by submission | Jun 24, 2018 | Story |
Author: John McLaughlin
Semi-Finals Status Update: Seven-in-Absentia vs The Last Dragon. One hour remaining!
The text crawls across Danny’s white suburban bedroom ceiling–bright and blood red–and descends behind the armoire on the far wall. He ignores it and continues his stretches. Reflected in the digital mirror, the room feels crowded around him: too many devices, too many vulnerable points. Did I forget anything? That unpleasant thought has some sticking power; yes, perhaps I did. The house is silent–his parents having left already for work–and he can almost feel the malevolent vibrations beneath the surface.
He bends once again to touch his toes, and his pterodactyl drone–the one his uncle got him for Christmas–takes flight, barely skimming his scalp before crashing through the window. Its pointy beak is laid to rest, impaled on broken glass and with its foamy flesh fluttering in the morning air. It’s always something, Danny thinks. He checks his watch: 58 minutes left on the clock. Not too bad.
He springs downstairs and munches a pile of seaweed puffs at the kitchen table. He sets the empty bowl in the sink–even during the clamor of a Tournament he minds his manners–and turns away just before the smart fridge slaps its door against the countertop. Thwack! “Shit, Mom’s gonna kill me.” Cracks leap across the granite as he sprints out the screen door to catch the bus.
“Good luck at school, Danny!” the neighbor shouts from his perfectly green lawn.
“Thanks, Mr. Olin!”
The neighbor’s drone-mower veers off course, pursuing Danny along a path of freshly trimmed grass. “Son of a bi–” Olin stammers. The man chases hopelessly after the renegade mower, the hose clenched in his bony fist dragging a trench through the petunias. Danny huffs it off the curb–saw blades clapping the wheels of his bike–and veers into the street.
His opponents have grown more advanced in the final bracket, there’s no doubt about it. He quickly calculates the route with the fewest networked devices, one that will take him on a shorter path across Main to the schoolhouse. He weaves his way among a remotely orchestrated ballet–manhole covers springing into the air on jets of compressed steam. Only one of them comes close to a hit; an impressive bit of programming, to be sure, but not much of a challenge–at least not for Danny. The crossing guard at the corner can only stare slack jawed.
He reaches Public School 43 and heads for the computer lab, where there’s a boy typing furiously at one of the shared consoles. Danny claps him hard on the back. “You’re it!”
“Aw, shit.” Fincher removes his massive headphones, visibly deflating in the seat. “I was sure I had you back on the lawn.”
“Yeah, that was a nice touch, Finch,” Danny says, and grips his shoulder with a grim finality, “but the Dragon is slain.”
The boy slumps away defeated and Danny takes his place at the throne. He logs into the Tournament network, scrolls to the bottom of his avatar’s toolbox and finds what he’s searching for: ‘Seven_ways_to_die_3.1’ lit up in red.
Semi-Finals Round 3: Seven-in-Absentia vs The Last Dragon
Are you ready? Y/N
Danny takes a moment to leer menacingly over his shoulder, savoring one last frightened wince from Fincher. “Ready…set…” He speaks slowly, tauntingly–and then double clicks.
“Run.”
by submission | Jun 23, 2018 | Story |
Author: J Frank Wright
Clank. Clank. Clank.
The little silver pyramid hovered to the kitchen sink. Two metal arms emerged and started doing the dishes.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
Dan thought that something must have broken when it crashed in the backyard. He didn’t think something this advanced shouldn’t be making that sound. That was over three weeks ago.
“They are coming. I am here to help,” it had said in its robot voice. It continued in what sounded like Spanish, then French, German, and some Asian language he wasn’t sure of. Maybe Russian. It finished with a couple he didn’t recognize at all. He guessed it was repeating the same message but couldn’t be sure. He didn’t speak any other languages. He only knew what the first few sounded like from movies.
It followed him into the house, making a little whirring noise as it hovered. He checked it for a phone number, email address, or anything that would indicate what to do with it, or who to contact if found, but there was nothing. Other than a weird port on one of the sides that was pulsing with a red light, it was completely smooth, shiny, and silver. There were no doors. He still hadn’t figured out how the arms came out. He tried connecting his phone and his laptop to the port, but he didn’t recognize the connection type.
He heard it speak the first time while he was inspecting it, and tried to get it to repeat itself, but it wouldn’t. He tried to get it to answer questions, but it wouldn’t. All it would do was hover and flash that damn light.
He sat down, opened a beer, and contemplated what he was going to do with it. He was just finishing his first when he heard it again.
“They are coming. I am here to help.”
“Who?” he asked. “Who’s coming? I don’t know what that means.” Finally, frustrated he said, “If you really want to help, why don’t you vacuum the floor, because I don’t know what to do with you.” Then the little silver pyramid lowered itself to the carpet. The whirring became louder, and it began vacuuming the floor.
Dan began testing more commands and commanding more complex tasks. He had to teach it to do the dishes, but once he did, it remembered every time. It would even blow them dry.
No one ever came for it, and he never heard anything about it on television or the internet. He knew somebody would eventually come looking for it, but until then, the little silver pyramid would do the cleaning, cook dinner, go clank clank clank, and every 48 minutes would repeat its message.
This is how it went for almost a month. On the 23rd day, the whirring stop. The little silver pyramid was sitting on the ground, no longer hovering. The red light had also gone out.
“Clean the dishes,” he told it, but it continued to sit motionless on the floor. Then he heard a faint ticking noise from inside the pyramid. It only lasted a few seconds, and then the whirring noise fired up again. The light around the port came back on, now a steady green glow. The little silver pyramid spoke again, this time with a new message.
“They are here. Deploy the weapon.”
Sirens began wailing in the distance.
by submission | Jun 22, 2018 | Story |
Author: Jamie Bainbridge-Wood
One- The Ghost is Another Machine
The point of this exercise is observation but I’m distracted, observing that Dwyer’s return will cause some surprise.
The house he has chosen sits at the top of a steep slope, between two snowy hills. The memories they gave me are out of date but the location makes sense, in that part of me that Dwyer and I share.
Dwyer’s wife is a good-looking woman. Handsome. I haven’t met many women but I think Doctor Pryce may have been one: a smell in the dark, different than the others, sensed dimly in the time before my assembly had been completed. The first step in a process. Much is still incomplete.
Dwyer’s religion is routine. He leaves and enters his house at similar times. So too, his wife. So too, his children. Upon entering his home, he makes similar noises to his wife and children and they make similar noises back. I know I would not be able to hear these within the limits of normal human hearing.
Even so, being here instead of in the dark, I am defined by barriers. They poured me into this, partition’s inner and outer ready formed. I have no memories before this.
The memories I do have, I share with Dwyer. The slide of his wife’s forefinger and thumb in a tender vice around his/my/our jaw as she reaches up for a kiss; the warmth he experiences for his children; our bitterness at being forced to a different life.
For me, the feelings are only memories. I wonder if this is a remove that Dwyer and I share. I wonder if I will ask him.
West rattles the small bones in my ear, an order to cease my observation. A response is not required. The camouflage that serves me well on the hill will make no difference in the house.
I discard it.
Two- Change Places
There are men that make machines. There are others that design the architecture to make them function. Of these camps, Dwyer belongs to the latter. His aims ran counter to my assemblers. He had been discovered. He had fled, beating a man into disability during his flight. This story, I overheard in the dark. I have no memory of this.
I let myself into the house, using the back door that Dwyer’s wife forgets to lock. The children are breathing above, asleep in their beds.
I am not to kill the children, I am not to kill the wife. Parameters, crystalline. I am promised completion.
At the foot of the stairs, my senses extend. I know them. I know which steps creak. My feet move in silent placement. For the first time, I know impatience.
On the landing, a light.
Three- Study
Dwyer’s wife finds him at his desk. She woke, heart pounding at a sound that bled into a dream. She finds him hunched over a tablet, flicking between panels with a finger and her heart stills. Dwyer, a smile already on his face, looks over his shoulder. “Bad dream?”
Returning the smile, she leaves the doorway
In a stand-up dresser in the corner of the study, a body with a broken neck is curled. Memories are lost forever, their absence a fracture in the new continuity.
Eyes distant, I look back down at the tablet.
Dwyer’s return will be a surprise.
by submission | Jun 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: Alicia Cerra Waters
My mother came home from work that night with the corners of her mouth turned towards her chin. She took off her yellow fluorescent vest and hardhat, which was scarred with dirt and the colorless remains of the unionist sticker she’d scratched off, and put them on a kitchen chair. She held her hands under the sink and the water ran black.
I was lying on the living room floor in my pajamas. The TV was on the reality channel, and they were doing a special on lewd messages sent between bots and unsuspecting humans on Instabook. I watched her, waiting for the lecture. She always got mad when I used VR because it cost us double the bitcoin of standard res, but that day she barely noticed. A miniature, digital man was gesticulating wildly in the middle of our living room, saying, “Don’t do it, dude! Don’t do it!” The box of Syrupy Corn Pebbles was empty and golden crumbs from the plastic bag were ground into the carpet at my side. She didn’t seem to see any of it as she sat down at the table with a bottle of beer in one hand and the whiskey in the other.
“There was no school today,” I said. “The education center had a staffing shortage again, so they canceled classes.”
She made a noise in the back of her throat and used the lip of the kitchen table to pop open her beer.
“How was work?”
“We’re building another delinquent processing center,” she said. “Open the curtains.”
I went to the window and looked down the twenty stories to the ground. Where we lived used to be beautiful, at least that’s what my mother said. There used to be museums and parks in the city, which had turned into abandoned buildings and overgrown lots before I was old enough to see any of them.
Outside, the nearest overgrown lot was now a pit with rolls of barbed wire piled almost as high as the tenth floor of our building. I saw a banner with the name of my mother’s construction company affixed to a chain link fence surrounding the area.
“We have a contract to build three more of these things in this county alone. So you can keep the VR on as much as you want. We can afford it.”
“Does that mean we have enough money for me to go to a private education center? I know some kids who go to one, and they say their teachers almost never get disappeared.”
My mother put down her beer. “Who told you that teachers are getting disappeared?”
I shrugged. “It’s obvious. Everyone at school knows that’s where they went.”
She took a deep breath and stood. She unplugged the TV and took the battery out of both of our phones. Her eyes were drilling holes into me when she spoke. “Don’t you see what’s outside? Shut your mouth.”
She kept drinking, and the light shifted so that our apartment was an eerie blue. I got up and put a cup of instant dinner in the microwave and watched the cardboard box spin under the yellow light. “When do they get to come out?” I said. “The thought criminals.”
“When that empty pit across the street looks like a garden again.”
“They didn’t do anything,” I said. “How could this happen?”
“It’s happened hundred times before. Your teachers would have told you about it, but most of them are disappeared.”
by submission | Jun 20, 2018 | Story |
Author: Steven Watson
“It’s not the end of the world.”
This was how Clara consoled herself: by affirming the exact opposite. For it was the end of the world. The earth was dying, and only a small mountainous corner remained habitable. A band of several hundred humans made it their home, but the altitude was such that no life could be born, and after fifty years only Clara was left.
Her pets would likely survive her. They were six-legged, with bulging eyes, and humans called them ‘zergs’. They had long dark-yellow bodies, not unlike slugs, and when they stood upright (which they could do only for several seconds at a time) they towered above any human.
Zergs did not generally consider humans prey, not because humans weren’t edible — which they were, despite their ill-health — but because they were a more powerful and, moreover, a more mobile species. Humans, therefore, kept the zergs as idle pets, much like pigs or sheep, and would sometimes farm them for food.
Several zergs encircled Clara. They were perfectly still — patient, even — though small hissing and whining sounds escaped their terrible mouths. Clara was dying and with her the human race.
The zergs’ preference for not eating humans only lasted up until the human’s death. They ate like snakes: slowly digesting the body whole. Occasionally a zerg attempted to eat someone nearing death, but another human would always stop them. For Clara, however, there was no one left to stop them. As she drifted in and out of consciousness she felt the greedy lips of a zerg attach to her forehead.
Inside the zerg, near what one might consider its belly, were hundreds of sharp teeth that ground the body it was digesting. It could have taken several minutes before Clara reached that stage, and in all likelihood, she would have suffocated by then.
But the zerg’s lips kept re-attaching, and never seemed to make it past her eyes. She was not aware of it, but the zergs were competing over her. One zerg would grip its lips onto Clara’s head, and another would stand up momentarily, then slam its body onto the feeder. It would then take its place and another would slam him. There were six zergs in total, and after one had scuttled away defeated, the remaining five seemed to find a compromise: two got the legs, another two got the arms, and one (the most dominant) got the head.
“Still,” Clara told herself, “it’s not the end of the world.”
Clara was nothing if not a fervent optimist. She thought a miracle to be more likely than a tragedy. She had still believed that she might birth a child, even after she had entered her dotage, and even after the last man had died. She did not identify the extinction of humans with the extinction of humanity. Some might call her a fool, but she remained happy; a more rational person would have been driven mad.
The most remarkable thing then happened — one might even confuse it for a miracle. The zerg sucking and drooling on her forehead had not yet reached her eyes, and so she could still see the sky. At first, the sky turned a crimson hue, then fiery pulses clouded it in kaleidoscopic colour. The pulses became regular and the sky quivered as if about to collapse. The heat became intolerable, and the zergs detached themselves from Clara and lay on their backs writhing in agony.
“Oh, dear me,” thought Clara, not altogether unhappily, “perhaps it is the end of the world.”
