by submission | Nov 19, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“It was the most beautiful thing ever crafted.”
“I’m sure it was, Akharini. But how can we steal it if it was destroyed almost seventy years ago?”
Akharini stared at Nur. Though the hour was late and time was short, he wanted to tell him so much about the minbar of Saladin, of the pulpit that commanded the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem for eight centuries until a so-called Christian radical torched it in 1969. A madman who incinerated the world’s finest piece of woodworking. Nearly 6500 pieces of pine wood, mother-of-pearl, ivory, and ebony fastened by ta’shiq, an interlocking technique that required no metal nails, no glue. Assembled as if by magic.
And more than magic.
That’s what Akharini really sought. Not the minbar itself. He could visit the reconstructed replica in al-Aqsa anytime he wanted to feast on its intricate arabesques, gilded muqarnas, and delicate mashrabiyas. But that was like looking at a picture of the original. Because, Akharini knew, the replica was just a three-dimensional picture of the real minbar of Saladin.
Akharini had discovered the secret. The minbar of Saladin was four-dimensional. That was its real beauty, its real magic. It took the form of a staircase with a door at the bottom and windowed booth at the top. But the two-paneled door carved with intricate geometric patterns featuring six-pointed stars was far more than a decorative entrance, it was a portal to other times, other worlds, other realities.
Face-to-face on a storied but now empty street in the Old City, he wished he could confide in Nur, but you just don’t trust a common thief with the keys to interdimensional travel.
“Most of the minbar was burned, Nur. But some of the original pieces survived and are safeguarded near Haram al-Sharif. That is what I aim to reclaim.”
“A few sticks of old wood. Why? What are they worth?”
One’s sanity, Akharini reckoned. Isn’t that why a madman had tried to burn the minbar? As a young man, Akharini had learned about the destruction of the minbar many years before and became obsessed with the arsonist. Why had he done it? Why had he set fire to such divine beauty? For decades Akharini studied the case, the minbar and the man, and it led him to the truth about both. The minbar was not just a sacred and glorious pulpit. It was a space-time portal. And the arsonist was not just a religious madman.
He was a temporal terrorist. A space-time traveler who’d become hellbent on preventing our world from reaching his reality through the minbar portal. And almost succeeded, but Akharini had painstakingly deciphered the cryptic scripts, glyphs and verses that activated the interdimensional gateway and now believed he could reopen it once he possessed the relics from the original.
“What’s left of the minbar is priceless, Nur.” He took from his pocket and waved a worn little notebook wherein he kept all his most closely guarded secrets on reactivating the portal. “With it I will have the power to move worlds.”
Nur stared at Akharini. There was so little he could tell him about how the world really worked. But, even a petty thief could recognize a golden opportunity. He headbutted Akharini, grabbed his notebook and fled down the infamous street, holding the key to a wildly misunderstood door of possibilities.
On the Via Dolorosa, dazed and bereft, Akharini wept.
by submission | Nov 17, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
The Government Men arrived in the early morning, before Papa had even left for work. Mama, crying, sat in the kitchen listening to the voices in the living room; it was only her restraining hand that prevented her daughter Cassie, home for college vacation, from storming in to join the discussion.
“You can’t just barge in and take Sara away,” Papa said. “She’s been with us over two decades. My daughter grew up with her, for goodness’ sakes!”
“Frankly Mr Opeye,” said the big calm one with the earring, “that just makes it more obvious that we’re in the right place.”
“You know she’s registered, right? What with the stories that get around, I did all the paperwork myself! Didn’t trust the agency to get it right.”
“Of course. That’s how we knew you had a domestic at all,” said the short one with the glasses. He was nervous, fidgety, eyes darting everywhere.
“So we’re being punished for having everything above board and legal?” asked Papa.
“Look, this isn’t about punishment, or registration, or even legality. It’s simply been decided that their kind are no longer welcome here; they take proper jobs from decent citizens, and the new government has decided to crack down.”
“But she’s part of the family! You can’t expect us to throw her out on the street like trash!”
“Those subject to the Order will be taken care of, Mr Opeye,” said Earring. “Don’t worry. They don’t end up on the streets.”
“They’ll be rehoused and retrained to do something more useful to society,” added Glasses.
“Like what?”
“No idea. Not my department.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t know what’s going to happen to her at all!”
Earring sighed. “We’re not here to debate this,” he said firmly. “Ask your domestic to gather their things and come with us. We have more pick-ups to do today, and the consequences of non-compliance include jail time and a large fine. Let’s not go down that road.”
“It’s alright, sir,” came a new, soft voice from the doorway leading back into the house. “Legitimate authority must be obeyed. I’ve already packed my essentials.” Sara, the family’s Self-Aware Robotic Assistant, stepped into the lounge. Less gracile than newer models, she had a poise that many of them lacked. “Let’s go, gentlemen. The family have been exceptionally understanding owners; not distressing them further is the least I can do to repay them.”
And that was that. It was the docility that riled Cassie most; the compliance with obedience programming that ran contrary to Sara’s own interests. Later that day, she rang her occasional boyfriend, who had his own Assistant.
“Seth, listen, some feds were here, and they took… oh. You too, huh? Yeah it sucks. And I won’t stand for it; what’s the point of having a robotics degree if I do? I tinkered with our Sara, she’s got a tracker embedded. We can find out where they’ve taken her. So are you up for doing something about this, and getting our friends back? Yeah? You’ll call your cousins too? Awesome!”
And that was how it all began. Sometimes, it just takes one person to unknowingly light the touchpaper for a revolution.
by submission | Nov 16, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
Yesterday on Christmas Day, I was at my filthy rich, albeit eccentric, uncle’s house. And that’s when and where everything went awry.
After dinner, he took me aside to his library to enjoy a cigar and a tawny port.
“We know our current materialistic paradigm is pure garbage, yet we still cling to it,” my uncle said.
“You mean because of the double-slit experiment,” I replied.
“Actually, I’m thinking of terminal lucidity.”
“Huh?”
“We believe our memories are stored in our brains and, when people have dementia, those neurons die, and those memories are irretrievably lost forever.”
“Sadly.”
“But we’ve known for centuries that wasn’t the case. Shortly before dying, some people with severe dementia become lucid, remember their past and recognize loved ones. So, our memories aren’t stored in our brains.”
“Then where are they stored and why can’t people with dementia access them?”
“That’s what I’m about to find out and I expect to change science, like Descartes, forever and perhaps win a Nobel Prize to boot!”
After we had finished our glasses of port, he led me to his huge basement. There was this big chair and a weird helmet with lots of wires connected to many devices resting on the seat.
“I plan on very briefly electrocuting myself and recording what happens while I’m totally unconscious. When I regain consciousness, I’ll see what my monitors detected and what I can remember of the time when I was unconscious. I suspect the monitors will show little or no brain activity, but I will be thinking of my departed wife while I’m unconscious and I may even meet her.”
All I said was that it sounded awfully dangerous. Regardless, he flipped some switches on the devices, sat down in the chair and donned his helmet. When he flipped a switch on the side of his helmet, I expected to see sparks and static electricity but all that happened was my uncle collapsed in the chair.
I had a lot of explaining to do to my relatives and to the police. I’ll never know what, if anything, my uncle learned about memories and materialism. But I do know that eerie experiment terminated his lucidity, at least, in this world.
by submission | Nov 15, 2024 | Story |
Author: Nell Carlson
The girl died. Normally, that would have been the end of it. Thousands of people died every day and millions had died in The Culling and nothing especially unusual happened afterwards. But the girl had died on the black river at the same time millions of people had been praying in remembrance and revenge and maybe that had made all the difference. After all, the river had been sacred before being so polluted that the waters formed black sludge as the tributaries died up one by one.
Later, of course, the oligarchs had requisitioned the river claiming it was too toxic for anything but their experiments. No one but their military personnel were to have access to the area the officers had made their base but the girl was starving. And starving people will take measures others would not. They fed her bullets, of course, as she ran over the causeway and cursed as she threw herself in the black water rather than falling flat on the causeway like they’d anticipated.
They filed their reports and sent someone to clean up the blood and promptly forgot about the killing. They killed someone every day, hundreds of people a day, sometimes, and they had simply fulfilled the Modus Operandi for thievery, of course. But in the water, in the form that had been the girl, something woke up.
The plague arrived the next day and in weeks the base became a memory but the body of the girl or rather something wearing her form walked away.
by submission | Nov 14, 2024 | Story |
Author: Beck Dacus
Each time the floor shuddered, all our chains rang like windchimes. The shackles around my ankles were linked to the wrists of the “inmate” behind me, on and on in a long line of us marching forward. As I stumbled I pulled on that man’s wrists, nearly bringing him down as well.
“Accretion disk turbulence,” growled the guard to my left. “Keep moving.”
I pushed up my glasses and walked. One by one they were patting us down, then ushering us through the docking tube into the shuttle. So far no one had made a scene.
We knew there was no way out.
I received my pat-down. I asked the guard, innocent as you like, “You know anything about the appeals process around here?” I could tell she wanted to bite my head off, but it was against policy for her to say anything. No one’s allowed to speculate what happens down there, because deep down they already know.
I shuffled into the shuttle and took my seat. “I heard,” said the chatty inmate across from me, “that we’s gonna get smeared all across the event horizon. Like bugs on a windshield, broke down t’little particles.”
“Nah,” another said. “Just inside the black, there’s a wall of fire. Fire so hot you burn to nothin’, not even atoms left behind.”
Mercifully I had been near the end of the line. The docking door shut behind the last inmate, and the walls hissed as our life support went independent. One final shake marked the shuttle’s detachment; harsh, white light flooded through the windows as we left the docking bay. Outside, the black hole’s gleaming accretion disk swirled close to lightspeed, the shuttle’s force screens the only thing standing between us and the hard radiation it was spewing out. The retrorockets ignited, and we were on our way down.
The guy across from me was a nervous talker. “So which is it, poindexter? You think we’ll get squished or fried?”
“We don’t know,” I shrugged. “That’s the point. The civilized galaxy gets to wash their hands of us with their conscience clean, because it’s not an execution. No one can prove that we’re dead, not without following us down there. So they call us inmates, locked in the perfect prison.
“But the math is clear. The inside is the same as the outside, and… well look.” I nodded to the window. “That used to be stars. Same will happen to us; we just need to get closer.”
Mr. Mouth slapped the guy next to him. “Listen to this! Talkin’ math at me. What are you in for anyway, four-eyes?”
I sneered at him. “Would you like to find out? I could use the practice.”
“Prepare for final crossing,” the autopilot’s voice cut in over the intercom. The accretion disk receded behind us, the nothingness of the event horizon filling the sky, then swallowing us whole. Aside from the cabin dimming, nothing changed.
I looked back at Mr. Mouth and shrugged. “What’d I tell you? Same shit, different spacetime.”
He looked like he was about to spit in my eye when he was rammed forward against his restraints. I was pressed into my seat so hard I almost blacked out, until the acceleration vector changed, pulling us all toward the back of the ship. I saw flashes of green light through the cabin windows, unnervingly close.
“Beginning evasive maneuvers,” the autopilot belatedly remembered to inform us.
“What the hell is going on!?” one of the other inmates said. The autopilot’s response seemed tense, almost afraid.
“It appears we are taking fire. From below.”
