by submission | Jul 25, 2018 | Story |
Author: David Henson
When I finally got my M-plant, I couldn’t wait to try it out. I went to a local cafe, approached a woman wearing a TP earring and touched my TechPath lapel pin.
She immediately raised her index finger. I held my fingertip to hers, and we both thought backwards from 100 by sevens. Once paired, we practiced sending and receiving simple images, mainly different breeds of dogs, to each other. I noticed her pooches all had dark, sad eyes and drooping tails. Then she shared with me that her brother recently had died. He hadn’t wanted to wait his turn for a qualified physician to insert the telepathy device into his cerebral cortex, but had instead risked going the trepanning route with some back alley charlatan.
Irene and I finished our coffees and agreed to meet again. I felt I was going to enjoy life as a TP. I think everyone did. On my thumb.
There were growing pains as techpathy spread through the population. One was Pink Elephant Syndrome. You know, try not to imagine a pink elephant, and it will pop into your mind. Well, before you sent a thought, you had to picture your transmission image. Mine’s a monkey with a plate of spaghetti on it’s head.
PES struck me one evening when I was having dinner with Irene. I’d developed deep feelings for her, but wasn’t ready to let her know. Don’t think of a monkey, I told myself and immediately pictured a baboon with a big red butt. Don’t imagine a plate. White porcelain with a gold ring. No spaghetti, no spaghetti, no spaghetti. Linguine with marinara. That’s ok. Linguine’s not spaghetti. Spaghetti is thinner. Mmmm, spaghetti. No! I knocked over a waiter with a tray of food when I jumped back, too late, to get out of range. That’s how I learned Irene wanted to be “just friends.” We still are. In fact, I probably owe her my life. On my shoe.
Eventually, there was a backlash from the Protectors Of Optimal Privacy when rumors of a gen-2 M-plant circulated. People with a Thought Snatcher Implant, as the POOPers called it, would have true mind reading capability. No pairing. No transmitting. The TSI would snatch thoughts from anybody with an M-plant. Fear of the TSI drove some people to have their devices removed. On the tree.
Then the POOPers hacked the HUC — the “impenetrable” Heisenberg Uncertainty Cloud, which every techpathic thought flashed through as it went from one person to the other. Now we’re suffering a plague of nursery songs. For nearly a year, every person with an M-plant has been humming This Old Man, Mary Had A Little Lamb, Alouette, Alle meine Entchen — whatever their earworm dictates. People can’t sleep, eat, or work. Suicides and divorce rates are up. There’s a global depression. On the door.
I’ve learned that by deep breathing and concentrating on something — math exercises, playing my clarinet, telling a story like this — I can keep my earworm at bay a few minutes. Then it bores its way back until I can muster the strength to tame it again.
There’s a long waiting list to get M-plants removed. I’m trying to hang on till it’s my turn. I almost went to a trepannist, but Irene talked me out if it. Sweet Irene.
… I just realized I should go back.To the beginning of this story. I left out something important. Breathe … breathe … No use. I can’t continue now.
All I can do now is give the dog a bone and go rolling home.
by submission | Jul 24, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro
I crawl through the flap in the folds of my midnight sheets and touch her again. I touch the cold stipple of her naked skin and it is not the hollow caress of dreams. I am not in that place where images scatter and reform into half-remembered fragments, this is not a dreamscape deprived of the tactile – this is real.
I cradle her, enveloping her in my arms in an embrace that has me clutching for the shifting sinew beneath her flesh as it gently detaches, molting from her frame. I hold her together. I must hold it together. I kiss her and taste her death, the crunch of scorched flesh that lines the ripped gape of her mouth.
She died speaking to me, filing a field dispatch from the desert of some fucking planet the numeric classification of which now escapes me. A number that will soon be forgotten too by those who sent her there, her massacre mediocre and but one of many.
I was the battalion surgeon, but, unlike the brave of the past who forged my profession amid the chaos of battle, I struck a more civilized stance. Boldly stepping into battle, vicariously in the form of a medi-drone, one I controlled from a deep-buttoned leather clad hell many light years from the boom and spark of war.
I had developed the diagnostic and surgical probes that lived inside the exo-armor within which she had sat in the desert and waited for the call to surge.
Impenetrable war suits that relayed vitals back to me in an instantaneous cheat of time and distance. Of course, we could have sent drone-soldiers to fight as well, but we humans we just love the crunch of boots on the ground.
So, she’s talking and I’m interrupting. It was dawn and the sun had just spilt across the endlessly undulating dunes, sucking the nights’ shadows back along the wind-carved waves that fingered their every surface. Then a sound, like the crack snap of thumb against finger…
The round hit her just below her left breast, slicing through the impenetrable and exploding next to her skin. Ripping upward the entirety of her shoulder plate erupted beneath her chin, severing her face in two.
She came to me six days after she died, I thought she a dream, one shredded from the shock that kneads behind my eyes and steals the moisture from my throat, but I could smell her blood as it soaked into the sheets. I could smell it and I smiled. I knew it was her but I didn’t reach out. I didn’t want her to scare and leave, and though the next day she was gone I knew she would return.
Her body lays still on the sand upon which she fell, forgotten, her suit still transmitting data as she rots in the sun. I watch the incoming feed every day, noticing the subtle changes as she gently breaks away.
I search for her every night, lost and tangled in the sheets. She is always there, though her skin is now stretched and purple. I hold her close and I weep as I feel her bones afloat in a sea of petrifaction ooze… Our marriage was far from perfect but she loved me… right?
She wouldn’t have come back if she didn’t love me. If she knew about what I did… she wouldn’t have come. She’d have stayed there crumpled and dead on that stained desert plane of a seven hundred and thirty-five gralloched souls.
But she came back, she came back for me.
by submission | Jul 22, 2018 | Story |
Author: Kristin Kirby
You get coffee. You glance around. A dozen people sip beverages or talk or stare into their computers.
You sit. Then you spot him.
He’s at the counter. He looks at the menu board. You watch him order, watch him pay.
“Thank you,” he says with a smile. “Have a great day.”
You press buttons on your device.
He’s terse the second time. “Thanks.” No smile.
You watch him take his coffee and sit. He drinks his coffee, scrolls messages on his phone. His movements are fluid, natural. Whoever built him did a good job.
After a moment he raises his head and looks at the people in the coffee shop. His expression is open, friendly. He smiles at a mother and child sharing cocoa.
You press buttons on your device. His expression turns blank. He goes back to his phone.
Eventually, he stands, walks to the recycle bin. His hand hovers. You press buttons on your device. He moves to the other bin and drops his cup into the overflowing trash.
Outside, cars move like sludge, trapped by traffic lights. The sidewalk throngs with busy people, eyes straight ahead or on their phones.
You watch him fall into step with the other pedestrians, walk briskly. You follow a few feet behind. His gait is seamless, no noticeable errors there. You send a note to your supervisors telling them you’re impressed with his construction.
He walks by storefronts and gray towering buildings. Then he slows and swivels his head. There’s a bird in a tree, singing. He’s listening with a rapt expression. You sigh and press buttons on your device. He strides past the tree and doesn’t pay attention to the bird.
Ahead, the sudden blare of a car horn, the squeal of brakes. A shriek of pain cut short.
He hurries toward the growing crowd of onlookers. In the street, cars have stopped. Behind the wheel of one car, a woman sits dazed.
Partway under the woman’s car splays a little girl, bleeding, moaning. The onlookers pull out their phones, snap pictures, gawk, snap more pictures.
You watch him push through the crowd. He pulls out his phone. But he doesn’t take pictures.
You watch him rush to the street.
You watch him kneel beside the moaning little girl and punch 9-1-1 into his phone, talk urgently. He leans down to check the little girl.
You inform your supervisors this one will need a complete rewrite. He isn’t acting like a human. Then you delete him.
by submission | Jul 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: Antoinette Constable
A three-year-old boy stumbles along the streets, long after bedtime, holding his
mother’s hand. They are skirting barricades, guns, uniforms. The mother longs to lie
down and sleep a long sleep somewhere safe, somewhere dry, yet she keeps trudging, pretending it’s not raining, pretending that soon, she’ll be home for dinner in her house, with her dark-haired child and his father. At dusk two days ago, the boy’s father suggested that she and the boy rest inside a covered cart on the road. Without warning,the cart was driven off with them as he tried to jump in. They saw him run, screaming to wait for him at the next village church, until the currents of the crowd absorbed him.
Three days and nights on church steps. Unwashed, with her unwashed boy sleeping,
nestled against her hip. She wants to go back. She has no map, no friends, nowhere to go.
Chaotically, people flee south, ditching cars that ran out of gas, discarding luggage,
pets, furniture pell-mell along the road, tramping ahead on foot away from advancing
armies rumored to slash women and children’s throats after shooting the men. When
Enemy planes or hail slash the asylum seekers, they take cover under planks, under
Cars, inside cars. In the next nearly deserted town, the woman and the boy who no longer talks. Late afternoon, she finds a church where an old priest says mass alone among candles. She rummages inside her purse and scribbles the boy’s name on a scrap of paper which she pins on his pocket, telling him to sit right there on the parvis and wait for her. He must be very good, she’ll soon be back. Wait, she says. Wait for me. Understand? Kisses both his cold cheeks. No looking back. No goodbye.
He can’t tell his full name or where he comes from. His parents have lost him, yet it is
he who must live in an orphanage. They shave his head against lice. No food is given him until he calls, “Mother,” a woman who never bore a child, “Father,” a celibate in black, “Sister,” hairless women with wings over their ears. At city hall, eventually, someone assigns him a last name, a birth date. At playtime, he draws planes, bombs, and people broken into pieces with blood spurting sideways. He sometimes draws houses, tongue protruding from his mouth. Houses with roofs and chimneys and walls of evenly stacked bricks and stones. Then school, anonymous in a dull uniform. Fights. Foster homes.Prizes. Scholarships. He’s an architect with a patient, consuming urge to build a house in which to live with two familiar strangers.
by submission | Jul 20, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mark Joseph Kevlock
“Why, sir, the past is a portal to happiness!” the interior re-decorator barked.
“I guess,” Smithfield hedged. “I’m just not sure about this anymore.”
“But the work is complete! Your living room, your entire downstairs, your upstairs, your backyard, even — all are redressed in sync with 1976 and ready for transport. With just the push of a button, you will be reliving your childhood memories once again!”
Smithfield surveyed the living room around them. He had to admit: they did excellent work at Timespace Incorporated. Every detail had been accurately recreated from the numerous photographs he supplied. The color of the rug, the texture of the paneling… even the holographic simulation of a typical day on Main Street that ran outside of the big bay window facing the front. Darned if his neighbors didn’t wave to him from across the street — computer-generated images compiled from public records such as driver’s licenses and various newspaper clippings. Even those who had died decades ago, like Old Man Feelaw, lived again!
Mortonson the re-decorator cleared his throat loudly.
“Ah, yes, your payment in full,” Smithfield said.
“Quite good, sir. Enjoy!” Mortonson departed.
Smithfield stood alone, cradling the control box. The refrigerator was stocked with 1970’s food. He didn’t plan on coming back for a long while. Life had gotten too tough for Smithfield. Too many disappointments. Too many of his family and friends no longer living. Smithfield pressed the button. The simulation fully activated. 1976 was his!
Later on, he could watch primetime TV. But for now, Smithfield stepped out into his childhood backyard. The gym set hadn’t been torn down. The walnut tree still stood. Even the sun in the sky was as he remembered it. Smithfield wept. The surrounding neighborhood wasn’t really there, of course. But Smithfield was. And that was all that mattered. Or was it?
Smithfield pressed the button again. 1976 deactivated. Smithfield called Mortonson back to the house.
“A problem, sir? Most unheard of! But rest assured — ”
“There’s no problem,” Smithfield said. “Not as regards your re-creation, at any rate.”
Smithfield handed the control box to the re-decorator.
“The problem is with me. I just can’t make the leap. I thought I wanted to escape. But not that completely. For a moment, as I stood there, I didn’t even know who I was anymore. You understand, don’t you?”
Mortonson nodded, suddenly more a psychologist than a salesman. “A very common reaction, Mr. Smithfield, just between you and me….”
