by submission | Apr 6, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mark Joseph Kevlock
We came to their planet to study them. But we found their understanding of the universal mechanisms to be shockingly limited. We’ve managed to locate only one man, thus far, among billions, who possesses any true grasp of the situation. His name is Dexter Collig. The following enclosed report is a portion of his neuro-transmissions, gathered on a typical day:
“Stupid alarm clock always plays a lousy song. I swear that snooze button gyps me out of a whole minute every time I press it. The day’s against me. I can feel it already. House is too cold. That heat never comes on when I need it. Why don’t I throw this razor out, if it keeps cutting me? Jesus, what did I eat last night? Any food I like never agrees with me. The shower takes forever to warm up. Let’s see what the cabinet has inside for breakfast. Nothing, nothing, and nothing. Thanks a lot.”
You will note subject Dexter Collig’s continual insistence upon blaming every physical object he encounters, denoting a wisdom regarding reality construction, that other members of his species appear to lack. The report continues:
“This engine never starts on the first try. If anything worked around here, I wouldn’t always be late. Freeway’s crowded with cars, like it’s out to get me. Here comes that ugly stretch of highway that makes me depressed every morning. Why does the sun have to come up right there between those mountain peaks, right at this particular moment, and shine right into my eyes? Damn sun. Damn weather has been lousy all week.”
The rest of our report demonstrates an unwavering consistency in Dexter Collig’s expressed attitudes. We would suggest that this subject be picked up immediately so that we might more quickly understand the source of his wisdom. Please advise. Senior Researcher, Jezz Trumble.
Reply from: Ministry of Galactic Relations.
Subject: Earthling Dexter Collig.
Permission to interview: Granted.
We abducted D. Collig from his shower stall at 7:32 a.m., Earthtime, by use of the phanto-ray. A transcript of our interview with him is here provided:
“Mr. Collig, do you know where you are?”
D. Collig: “What the hell happened? Where are my pants!”
Fast-forwarding to relevant portion…
“How is it, Dexter Collig, that you come by this extraordinary wisdom, daily expressed?”
“Huh?”
“You understand the nature of reality far better than any of your fellows.”
“It must have been those six slices of pizza I had last night, giving me this nightmare….”
“Not at all, D. Collig. Although your ability to pinpoint each source of stress hampering your existence fascinates us no end.”
“Yeah. I throw a lot of blame around. So what?”
“You accuse physical objects of working against you.”
“Because they are!”
“We know.”
D. Collig here expresses great surprise.
“You mean, I’m right? The world is out to get me?”
“Of course it is, Dexter Collig. Because you made the world. And that is the world you made.”
“Huh?”
“Reality is built upon one’s expectations. It complies with belief, deep down in its sub-physical layers, where your thoughtrons interact with elementary components to create matter.”
D. Collig: “I’m like a god, then….”
“Yes, Mr. Collig. If a red light turns against you, it is because you believed it would. And so, naturally, that red light is to blame.”
D. Collig, pleased with himself: “I’ve been right all along!”
“You lend us hope, D. Collig, for the rest of your species.”
Subject was returned to shower stall at 7:39 a.m., Earthtime. Slipped and hit his head against glass door.
Blamed soap.
by submission | Apr 5, 2018 | Story |
Author: Josie Gowler
Since I woke up in the base hospital, there’s been a steady stream of people coming and going and being nice to me in between. The burns on my hands are being dealt with: they don’t hurt at all now. The skin just feels tight under the bandages.
When I landed last week I elbowed open the cockpit, tumbled out of the pilot’s seat and slid down the side of the ship: it was really hard to descend when I couldn’t use my hands. It did, however, look planned and a little bit elegant; I then wrecked the essential dignity of the occasion by vomiting on the deck.
I didn’t think the assembled crap-hats had expected that. The cheers rang around the bay regardless, with lots of “Well done”s and “Good show”s (what was this, the nineteenth century?)
“This’ll shorten the war,” I heard a medic saying, out of breath from rushing over to me.
Too right it will, I thought, as my cheek hit the cold floor and I passed out.
And now I’m here, and the news outlets – skipping the footage of my actual landing – think I’m some sort of hero. I thought that Jayce would have something sensible to say, but she rushes in then pauses to catch her breath. “They’ve surrendered!” she gasps. “The big green bastards have actually surrendered!” She kisses me. “You did it!”
“Well, not really,” I reply between snogs. “It was the T-cell boffins that did the hard work. Folks like you.” That’s how I met her: the one thing I can be grateful for.
She kisses me again. “Only you could have got their DNA in the first place. Only you could have piloted the ship back to drop the payload off. Only you could have made it back through all that railgun fire.”
I’m about to say something when we both spot General Stanley marching along the corridor. “Great,” I mutter.
Jayce kisses me on the forehead and whispers in my ear, “Cheer up. Maybe as our next feat we boffins can gene edit him into not being an arsehole. Or into a domesticated non-aggressive arsehole, if nothing else.” She giggles and flees.
The General launches into a boring pre-prepared speech even though I’m the only one in the room.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” I quote when he pauses for breath.
“Nietzsche? Oh, come now. If you’d really had concerns you wouldn’t have volunteered. And later on, when you’re better and you think about what you’ve done, you’ll be proud of yourself.” He resists the urge to shake my hand and pats me on the shoulder instead.
I smile as the door swings shut behind him, because that’s what’s expected of me. I don’t sigh. I don’t scream. I do roll the syllables of the word genocide around in my head.
And I never thought the word hero could taste so bitter.
by submission | Apr 4, 2018 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Tomi Mura, a specialist in inter-planetary law, sat aboard a six-person capsule en route to Planet Arazan. The magnetic-field modulator of the small hyperbolically propulsed vessel gave her the sensation of gliding gently through the depths of an immense sea.
She had departed from the Old Planet, the common name in the interstellar territories for that ancient remote body otherwise known in the archaic languages of her world as terra, eretz, dee cheeo, and ardh. She turned her head to the window at her right and beheld glowing nebulas of star clouds and nuclear luminescences on the dark horizon.
Human expansion into deep space had, in the course of two millennia, produced myriads of societies. And where the quadrillions of humanity had dispersed, they set in motion on their newly claimed worlds natural, competing variations of attitudes, behaviors, interests, and values, which rapidly grew into distinctive cultures with their own dominant characteristics, principles, and laws.
So, too, had it been on Planet Arazan, whose idiosyncrasy was its militant status as a self-declared non-treaty independent planet and the only planet on which the Radical Machine Rightsists (RMR) had established the Anthrobotic Republic, based on the full existential equality of human beings and machine beings.
Tomi Mura reviewed her virtual data notes about the case for which the Ministry of Planets had dispatched her: Jizu Mori, a curiosity seeker on a tour visit from the Old Planet, had committed a capital offense on Planet Arazan—violation upon a machine, resulting in its deactivation. By the absolute categorical law of the RMR, he had no option for on-planet or inter-planet legal defense, and he would be tried and executed on terms reciprocal to his crime—violation by a machine, resulting in his death. The law did, however, for diplomatic reasons, permit a nonparticipant observer from the homeworld of the accused to be present as a witness to the execution.
The capsule navigated through a proton storm, passed the solar flares of two white binary stars, and coursed toward a scintillating red-giant star in whose habitable zone orbited a nubilous green sphere, the Planet Arazan. The capsule autonomously triangulated its landing coordinates, entered the artificially oxygenated atmosphere, and made its way to the silicate rock surface below.
Tomi Mura was the only one authorized to deboard. The capsule door connected her to a disembarkation tube that led to a magnetic levitation shuttle. She wondered where the reception committee was, and she sat in an empty passenger car, which traveled noiselessly for ten minutes above the craggy, faded green, treeless landscape. An isolated crystalline edifice below came to her view. The shuttle stopped at an empty station. She made her way down an escalator and, outside, walked up a wide path to the structure.
She entered the edifice, and within its walls was a vast room where, to her surprise, she saw Jizu Mori, short, square-headed, denuded. He was neurally immobilized and positioned before a projected holographic recording showing him in an accommodation room, luring, attacking, and ravaging an android minder designed in the soft form of a girl who appeared no more than fourteen. Her name was Nazeera-3.
A conveyor strip suddenly carried him into an observation chamber. Two sliding metal-alloy doors sealed shut. The neural immobilizer switched off. He trembled in a fit of paroxysms. Sweat rushed down his face. He heard a noise, turned around, and saw advancing an ambulant machine that resembled the primitive corkscrew—and it pounced on him.
Tomi Mura was speechless before the punitive scene, and when all that was left was a mince of the man, she fainted.
A while later, she awoke to find herself on board the six-person capsule, deep in space, on its way home. She was feverish and haunted, staring at the silent sitting crew members, and she wondered if the Old Planet androids who accompanied her on the journey would have agreed with existential law had they witnessed the incident on Arazan.
by submission | Apr 3, 2018 | Story |
Author: Alexander D Jones
The queue was massively long. Fridays were always the busiest. Everyone would clock off early so that they could get a decent night’s sleep.
Garth was probably thirty people away from the check-in point and the building’s entrance. He checked his watch. If he got inside in the next twenty minutes he’d get a full ten hours.
The queue was moving incredibly slowly. Garth let out a sigh. He’d be lucky to get in in the next twenty hours at this rate. The queue shuffled forwards another metre or two.
Garth looked up towards the darkening night sky. The smoke and smog from the city’s multitude of factories meant that nowadays even the moon was barely visible. As he contemplated what the city had become a scuffle broke out at the front of the line.
Two men in dark clothes were pulled from the line and thrown to the floor by some security guards. Suddenly a mass group of security personnel descended on the line. Everyone was being pushed towards the doors of the building.
Garth could only just concentrate on keeping his footing as the crowd was bulldozed forwards. People were being crushed as the masses were pushed and shoved through the narrow doors.
Garth heard an explosion and steadied himself as the building shook.
A large man in a security uniform grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards one of the sleep pods.
Garth could hear gunfire outside now.
“Hey!” Garth tried in vain to release the man’s grip.
“What are you doing?! Oi!” The man pushed Garth into one of the pods and slammed his hand down on the close button.
The door slid shut, sealing off Garth’s pleas. Gas filled the pod as Garth slipped into merciful sleep.
The glass front turned black and green writing appeared. It read: “Official Sleep Time: 8:48pm.”
by submission | Apr 1, 2018 | Story |
Author: Alex Z. Salinas
I pressed my palm against the reinforced window in my bedroom. The glass felt cool, exactly like they felt in my previous life. The difference was that on the other side of this one, there was stretched before me an infinite and ever-expanding black canvas. It was filled with mostly nothing, and we knew mostly nothing about it. This put me in a mood.
I removed my hand and focused on my ghost-like reflection. My face glowed amber, a result of the Himalayan salt lamp by my bed. My eyes, naturally dark brown, were reflected as two small black craters, which seemed appropriate given the indescribable state of my soul. I tried to grasp reality as it was, but I couldn’t.
Two small hands wrapped around my waist. They gripped me comfortably.
“What’re you doing, baby?” I heard my wife’s voice ask softly.
“Zoning out,” I answered, caressing the tops of her smooth hands.
“It’s beautiful out there, isn’t it?”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“Well, not to interrupt your sesh, Mr. Space Cadet, but came to let you know that dinner’ll be ready in five. We’re having Mexican tonight.”
“Didn’t we have Mexican last night?”
“No, we had Guatemalan. There *is* a difference.”
I didn’t feel like turning this into a big deal—I easily could have—so I said: “Thanks for letting me know, sweetie. I’ll be out in a bit.”
My wife kissed the back of my neck and I heard the satisfied patter of her footsteps fade away.
Mexican, Guatemalan, none of it mattered, I thought. Our dinners were at the mercy of a professional cooking staff. Most of the cooks looked Mexican, though I’d noticed one of them was Asian.
I selected a random point outside my window to zone in on—probably an unmapped coordinate of space irrelevant to everyone except me.
I fixated on the point with laser focus, like a sea creature spotting his prey from a distance.
An announcement briefly stole my attention.
*Attention passengers, this is Chef Johnny speaking! Tonight’s main course will feature enchiladas verdes, brown rice, black beans, and flour tortillas so soft my dear abuelita would’ve had a cow! ¡Perfecto! For desert, there’ll be tres leches cake prepared by yours truly! ¡Delicioso! Don’t miss out! Bring your appetites and your maracas!*
As I continued fixating on a piece of unidentified space which I knew to be much older than anything I’d known on earth, I felt something inside me unspool, like a piece of fabric come undone by pulling on a loose string.
We were having Mexican tonight. We’d had it last night, I was sure, and we’d have it tomorrow night and the night after that until we reached our destination. These decisions were out of my control, as were so many others. What little choice I’d had, I’d given the rest of it away. And for what?
Suddenly, for a split second, I hated my wife. I hated her with everything inside me. My gut burned. Looking into space, into the cold oblivion none of us knew a thing about, something crossed my mind. An idea. It told me something had to be done about my situation. Something drastic. My hands trembled.
I closed my eyes and touched the window again. The glass felt cool. Its cool familiarity calmed my nerves.
I was resigned to Chef Johnny’s enchiladas verdes tonight.
Mexican, Guatemalan, it didn’t matter. In space, your meals are determined by hired cooks. Things could be worse.
