by submission | Jul 13, 2018 | Story |
Author: John Xero
“The storm is upon us,” Barrett states grimly, finally looking away from his monitor, finally acknowledging the absence of hope.
“How bad?” As if I need to ask.
“Bad enough.” He shakes his head. “If we’d just caught the edge of it… If we could still access the lower levels…”
“If neither of us had volunteered…” I add. “But we knew what we were getting into.”
He nods.
“Have you transmitted the data?” I ask. Duty first.
“It’s gone, my interpretations attached. For all the good it will do them. These things are too damn unpredictable. I’m live transmitting anything we get until we lose the equipment or the dish, hardly think power drain’s a big concern now.”
I stand and walk the few steps to the back of the small dome, thumbing my personal locker open. Tucked at the back is a slender bottle of golden brown liquid. I hold it up, show it to Barrett.
“I thought that was all gone to the nu-rats, spoils of their victory – the great annexation of bunker gamma two niner’s subsidiary levels.”
I feel the edge of a smile tugging at my lips, despite the situation. “Is that what you’ve been calling our infested wreck of a basement? Shame about the ice and glasses situation, but I guess that’s the least of our worries.”
“The lack of ice and glasses situation?”
“Exactly.”
I take a disrespectful swig from the bottle, an injustice to the vintage and craftsmanship within, closing my eyes as it scorches my throat and drips fire into my gullet. I hand it over with a bittersweet sigh.
Barrett regards the bottle. “Are you religious? I always thought the truth of the old world, the above world, the work we do, would make me stop believing. How could He let this happen?” He takes a swig, grimaces, and passes it back. “I think I wanted to stop believing, you know, but it’s too ingrained.”
“No, I don’t believe in a higher being, or beings. But I did come here to escape.” We’ve never talked like this, all the time we’ve been stuck here together. “There was a guy, back home. I couldn’t…” My turn for a slug, and I need this one. “I couldn’t stop going back to him. I was trying to save myself, requesting this posting. Looking for a way to stop thinking about him.”
“Did it work?”
“As well as you forgetting your god.”
He takes another gulp, growling as he swallows. He coughs. I don’t think he can ever have been a drinker. Another thing I never knew about him.
I hear it now, worrying its way in at the edge of my consciousness. At first, I think it’s the nu-rats again, misfortune and doom doubling down on us, catching us in a terrible vice. A scratching like inch-long claws on concrete, like cracked crystalline teeth in overgrown jaws gnawing at the walls. I remember their pearl white eyes, glimmering in our torch beams, blind from a life below ground.
It’s above us, this new scratching, and nothing lives above ground anymore.
Barrett looks up too.
This is the greystorm. Sand and steel, dust and concrete, cities whipped into particles that rage in never-ending hurricanes across the surface of the world. Our dome, our reinforced home is wearing away, eroding beneath a fury our ancestors wrought.
We say no more, listening to the steady increase in noise, the approaching end, passing the bottle back and forth, the two of us spending our last moments thinking about everything we came here to forget.
by submission | Jul 12, 2018 | Story |
Author: Jason McGraw
Zach opens his AI tutor and selects “Asteroid Belt” from the index. In his learning visor, 3D images of spinning rocks reflect the sun.
A male voice narrates: “The Asteroid Belt is located between –” Zach fast forwards. “There are three major types of asteroids. Metallic –” Fast forward. “Common ores present in asteroids include –” Stop.
“Tutor, I have a question about asteroids,” Zach instructs.
“Go ahead, Zach,” answers the tutor
“Can people live on asteroids?” Zach asks.
The Narrator begins. “Astronauts have visited, captured, and successfully mined asteroids in the Asteroid Belt. The first such mission –”
“Do humans live on them?” Zach interrupts.
“No Asteroids are currently colonized.”
“Is it possible?” Zach asks, hopefully.
“I do not understand the question, Zach, can you rephrase your question?”
“What do people need to live in space?” Zach queries again.
The Narrator answers. “Space suits provide a human with air, warmth, cooling if needed, constant pressure, protection from radiation, and carabiners to which devices can attach. Examples of devices which attach to carabiners include –”
Zach interrupts, his voice louder this time. “Do space suits have food and water?”
Narrator: “For long spacewalks, astronauts will attach external tanks to their suits that provide calorie rich water from which the astronaut can drink. The most common size of tank is one gallon and provides 2,500 calories.”
“How many tanks can a person carry at once?”
“I do not understand your question, Zach.”
“How long can an astronaut live in a space suit?”
Narrator: “An astronaut in a typical spacesuit can be in space for up to six hours before the astronaut’s air supply must be changed or supplemented. For longer journeys in space, an astronaut will carry –”
“Do asteroids have air?” Zach is practically yelling.
“There are no known asteroids with an atmosphere.”
Zach takes off his tutoring visor and, without the noise and light canceling features of the visor, Zach is momentarily disoriented by alarms and flashing lights. Pushing off from his desk, he uses handholds to make his way in zero gravity. Zach feels clumsy in his bright green emergency space suit with the helmet dangling behind him on a tether.
He sees his classmates, helmets on, huddled at a bulkhead. On the other side of the bulkhead is the vacuum of space and in that space is the front half of their spaceship. Holding onto the wall, Zach can hear and feel vibrations as small rocks bounce off of the hull of their crippled ship.
“The tutor wasn’t any help,” Zach tells his classmates. “But we can’t live on an asteroid.”
Zach feels vibrations and hears twisting metal. He decides to clamp on his helmet. Soon a rock breaches the hull and the ship’s air escapes into space.
The broken spaceship is not going to protect us anymore. Zach makes his way, hand over hand, to an airlock. It opens easily since the pressure is the same inside and out. Pushing off from the hull with his legs, Zach soon sees the two pieces of the broken spaceship, thousands of pieces of flotsam, and hundreds of asteroids reflecting sunlight just like in the tutorial. In the debris are green objects — others in emergency space suits.
Zach traces the path of one such asteroid with his eyes as it silently collides with his former spaceship. Zach feels a sharp pain in his stomach. High-velocity debris has run through him and depressurized his spacesuit. Zach has joined the flotsam.
by submission | Jul 11, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro
My daughter is born into the whore spit snarl of a Cape Hatteras hurricane. Beautiful and waxy, her delicate scent distilling the shedded taint of my own sweat, piss, and blood. Blue nostrils flare as tiny lungs struggle to fill, but for this, I apportion her no blame. The fault is mine, though really it isn’t. This the twisting helix that drills ever back through me into her and back and then back; gestational diabetes my most unwanted of genetic gifts. Carry on baby unwrapping your toys, I’m so sure they’ll compensate – the elegant slice of my jaw, the flat of my belly and a dogged inability to produce stretch marks a perfection confection of body just for you.
Your arrival will see to it that, due to a hypertensive spike, we’ll stay in this ward and I’ll be kept from that my most coveted of days. Christmas, but again how are you to know how special it is to me? To be wrapped with your father before a flamed hearth that pops as we gleefully disrespect the nog, this the day that we met – it’s mine and not yours to take.
But alone in this room, you squirm in my arms as a bubble forms at your lip, my wants they shuffle and confuse as I inhale the wispy float of your hair.
What a beautiful and well-mannered little girl they’ll hiss between teeth struck closed by jealousy’s sticky tar; damn how I love when it sprouts. But one day you’ll creep into my study and hunt out the album, its cover patinaed with age. You’ll flick through the pages and find those that sparkle and snip them to pieces you will. Irreplaceable and dear, but then girls will be girls and how can I condemn you for youth?
At sixteen you’ll smoke and slice at your skin, you’ll curse at your father and let a girl touch your body, three of these things I can take…
“Scroll back, I’d like to see that self-harming thing again… maybe it’s something we could deal with?”, so says the man who cannot deal with toast that is not relieved of its crust.
I sigh, “Why bother, why settle for skirting the rim when we can roll out a slam-dunk?”.
“Frances…”
“Yes Mother”, her life-grab simulation flickering before me.
“… I was happy to have met you”, I say turning my daughter off.
The doctor’s hologram needlessly swivels as he speaks,
“Don’t worry the sample was good, actually very good… “, winking at my way too conceited husband.
“The initial deposit is still very much viable, seven milliliters… way, way above the average sample. As you know that’s some 700 million possible life-grabs. The overseer routine is working overtime to weed out the obvious rejections but your projected lifestyle parameters are so superbly detailed… I wish all of our prospective parents were so thorough. Be patient. Your perfect daughter, or son as may be, is in there. Trust me, seven milliliters, actually 7.3… “, he snorts, again nodding at my husband as if eggs are not as important as beans in the making of this artificial feast.
“… a Thor-sized spawn if ever I’ve seen one”, the self-evolved sexism exhibited by these sentient AI Med drones never ceases to amaze me.
My husband straightens in his chair as I think he remembers that I have a 3:30 appointment with Donald, my buttock augmenter.
“What do you say, honey, got time to review one more?”, he asks.
My son is born into the whore spit snarl of a Cape Hatteras hurricane.
by submission | Jul 10, 2018 | Story |
Author: Madison McSweeney
Under a sweltering summer sun in southeastern Ontario, an aerial camera watched as two boys walked through a wheat field.
Each boy dragged a heavy wooden plank; as they traversed the land, stalks of wheat bent and flattened underneath them. After exactly seven hours of work, they abandoned their tools and trudged across two hundred feet of flattened and un-flattened cropland, emerging on the other side, scratched, sunburned, and surly.
At the edge of the field, a news camera turned to capture their exit, before refocusing on KX604 anchor Hadi Chadha.
Hadi read from a cue card: “Last week, a Mellonville grain farmer was shocked to find portions of his field flattened into an elaborate pattern. KX604 spoke to renowned ufologist Maxwell Salinger, who speculated that these crop circles could have been caused by radiation from alien spacecraft. He even suggested the city send samples of the damaged stalks in for testing.”
“But yesterday, two local teens approached KX604 News with a confession: they were behind the whole thing.”
The camera fixed on the boys as Hadi narrated: “Sixteen-year-olds Josh Drayton and Brady Michaels say that they snuck onto the farm in the dead of night and created the circles themselves, as an elaborate practical joke.” She pivoted to the pranksters. “Mind explaining how you did it?”
Brady shrugged. “We tied some planks of wood to ropes, and just dragged them through the field. Crushed the wheat pretty good.”
“But what about those incredible designs? Surely you didn’t just wing it?”
Brady hesitated; Josh piped up. “No, that was planned out. We visited the field several times, too, to case the route.”
Hadi nodded and returned to the camera. “However, some didn’t believe them. Bill Petrovsky, the farmer whose crops were affected, maintains that it would have been impossible for the boys to level such a large portion of his field without him noticing. So, with Mr. Petrovsky’s consent, Josh and Brady volunteered to replicate their prank – under the watchful eye of a KX604 aerial camera.”
Brady cringed; Josh elbowed him.
“In keeping with the timeframe of the original ‘prank,’ the crop-circlers were given less than seven hours to forge three circles, at 200, 150, and 100 feet in diameter. Let’s see how they did.”
She raised a hand to her earpiece, indicating she was addressing the aerial cameraman. “What do you see, Allan?”
The helicopter doubled back and made another sweep across the field. The camera panned across three freshly-made crop circles, 250, 150, and 100 feet in diameter. They were a bit rougher around the edges than the original three, but the visual was close enough.
#
The story ran at six o’clock. No one who watched was surprised that Brady and Josh had been behind the crop circles. They all knew the boys were troublemakers.
Of course, no one who watched the broadcast knew why they knew that. Come to think of it, none of the viewers could quite recall where they’d met these boys, or if they knew who their parents were.
Had they thought about the story more deeply, it would have occurred to them that there was no Drayton family in Mellonville, and that the youngest Michaels in town was a 52-year-old spinster.
But they didn’t, and it didn’t.
Similarly, no one thought it odd when they didn’t see the boys around after that. No one wondered where they’d gone, or even remembered they’d ever been there.
However, a stargazer did report a strange set of lights in the sky just a few hours after the broadcast, and two indistinct figures rising into the sky.
by submission | Jul 8, 2018 | Story |
Author: Anne Dewvall
The tiny blue pill gleamed in Jerome’s palm as it danced with electrical impulses. This capsule had the power to transform the human experience, and through that, the world, but people were wasting it, eating the same shit they always had, with slightly improved results. Vita-E was supposed to change anything you ate after swallowing it into a nutritious, digestible substance.
He wanted to eat something people had never eaten before. Most Americans used the supplement to turn tasty junk into something that would actually sustain human life. Those in the developing world relied on the pills to survive what would formerly have been a starvation diet of leaves, bark, and the odd insect or two. Neither application was adequately ambitious. Anything was a word quivering with possibility, begging to be challenged, and he would answer that call.
Jerome ran his other hand across the slippery surface of the helmet he wore to increase cognitive function and surveyed the minimal contents of his loft. Hoverboard? No, he needed that to get around. Computers, media screens, lights, toilet – all too expensive, too functional, and too hard on the teeth. His eyes landed on a grey, wool cardigan. Replaceable, sturdy enough to make digestion difficult, and easy enough to ingest. Perfect. He popped his Vita-E and perched on a counter. Dinner time. Unraveling the wool, he slurped it like spaghetti, gleefully imagining the nanobots tearing apart the fibers and transmuting them into something his body recognized as food.
Aside from a little indigestion, which he figured was normal for such a high fiber meal, he felt great. So it was true, you really could eat anything. The world was alive with possibility. Peonies, rubber gloves, plastic wrap: he would eat his way through the world. Jerome’s skeptical mind was gleeful with the realization.
That is, until the following day, when it was time for his morning constitutional. After several hours of straining, he finally passed a felted wool log.
