by submission | Nov 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Beck Dacus
One half of the sky brimmed with stars, the Sun at one light-week’s distance barely outshining the rest. The other half was utterly dark, as if the universe ended at a sheer cliff. As I approached the blackness, detail started to emerge, my headlamp casting shadows on icy gravel the color of moonlit fog. I slowed my approach with the cold gas thrusters of my suit and reached my hand out to touch the surface, feeling regolith with the consistency of laundry lint.
“Contact,” I radioed.
“Congrats,” Stan replied. “You are the first person to ever touch OCO-2141-Oph12.”
“My resume will never be the same.”
Oph12 was an Oort cloud object, one of trillions out here. This was where the comets that graced Earth’s sky came from, including comet 614N Canskel, which would be swinging by Earth in a week’s time. Trouble was we’d never found a cloud like it around another star. Some cold comet belts, but not a swarm of *trillions* in a shell around the star. We’d looked with telescopes, we’d even sent unmanned probes to the stars, and they didn’t find a single alien Oort cloud.
So are all those other stars the weird ones, or is ours?
“Okay Siggy, everything looks nominal from here.” Stan knows I prefer “Sig.” “Go ahead and proceed to the crevasse, about 15 meters to your right.”
“Copy.” I pushed right with my thrusters, gliding over the surface in the measly gravity. The edge of the crevasse was a gradual slope; I could only distinguish it from the comet’s horizon by the fact that the darkness around me deepened, the starlight receding into a narrow sliver at my back. Up ahead the wall seemed to end; I let myself get excited by the possibility of a hollow void in the comet’s interior. Instead, I *ran into* the dark— the smooth surface caught the light of my headlamp as I turned to face it. “You seeing this? Or… not seeing? Volcanic glass maybe, except where the hell is a comet going to get lava….” I reached out, felt my palm press against the void, smooth and cold.
My hand was outlined in light. I felt nothing, but I yanked it back like I’d touched a hot stove. Then a circle made of assorted glowing rectangles and triangles formed on the surface, an iris burning bright orange— *Jesus Christ, it’s a screen!*
“Talk to me, Sig! Your vitals are spiking!”
“Look at my feed, Stan! It’s… I don’t know, but it’s sure as hell not a comet!” I maxed out my reverse thrust. “Warm up the engines, we’re—“
My radio started screaming. A second later my helmet computer filtered the signal out to spare my hearing. “Stan, what the hell was that!?”
“Transmission from Oph12,” he replied. “Broadband. There’s a match in the language database, it’s… Sumerian?”
“What the… well, what’s it saying?”
“Three words, on repeat. ‘They have returned.’”
*‘They.’ It means us. But no one’s ever been here before….* I drifted into the airlock and started pressurizing. “I’m back in! Gun it!”
“Jesus… Sig, it’s not just Oph12. The two nearest comets to us just started sending the same message. It’s too early to be sure but… I think the message is *spreading.*”
“Spreading,” I repeated. “Spreading to every comet in the Oort cloud….”
*But why stop there?*
“Oh God!” Stan breathed. “Sig, it’ll reach comet Canskel right when it passes Earth! What the hell do we do?”
I breathed deeply. “Nothing changes. Set course for Earth.
“Whatever they’re planning, we’ll be there to meet them.”
by submission | Nov 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: J. Scott King
“Can he continue?” A familiar voice, distant, urgent.
And nearer, “The Seconds are conferring, Captain.” Then, more urgently, “Come no closer, sir! Resseaux, control your man!”
A gruff, mumbled reply I can’t make out.
“I’ll have him done!” That first fellow again… Captain Eddings. Right. Yes, that’s the one. Never liked the man.
My eyes open to falling snow, grand white flakes drifting down in the cold, still early morning air.
Two people, a man I recognize but can’t quite place and a woman I recall meeting briefly but a short while ago, huddle alongside me. The woman, a physician, I think… yes, a healer, has unbuttoned my vest and is cutting away my shirt with a palm knife.
I crane my head forward. Is that my blood?
The shirt falls away, and… goodness, shot! Near-center chest, just below the sternum. Red-black blood oozes from a single hole, steaming in the morning chill.
I raise my right arm from the ground. A flintlock wavers unsteadily in my hand, a wisp of smoke curling from the barrel like the Captain’s wife at play. I let it fall to the snow. My arm follows and my head drops back to the ground.
Damn.
Dawn cannon fire erupts in the distance. A long way off but I can feel the play of it in the earth. The dead fall by the thousands every day, but still they come.
“Did I… hit him?” I ask, breathless.
“You did not, sir,” says the vaguely familiar man. “Be still, and let Helene see to your wound.”
I close my eyes, take a deep, painless breath. The air is alive with gunpowder and bergamot, with the memory of desultory words said in jest over polite tea.
A barrage of angry footfalls concusses through the snow, halting abruptly at my side.
“Get him up! I demand satisfaction!”
Eddings again. I don’t have the strength to face him.
“He’s finished, Captain,” that familiar voice again, admonishing. Lieutenant… Bertrand. That’s it. Claude. A good man.
“We best have his head before he turns,” Bertand says in a hushed tone. “It won’t be long now.”
Ah, yes… That. I suppose it wouldn’t do to switch sides.
“Leave him in the snow to rot!” Eddings barks. “I’ll put another ball in the fool when next our paths cross.”
Lieutenant Bertrand sighs. “As you say, Captain.”
As my killer marches off, arrogance in every step he takes, I manage a blood and bile grin and whisper my last breath.
“Not if I find you first…”
by submission | Nov 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
The cheap hotel room was draughty, the shadows ink in the recesses. Each sheet of green William Morris wallpaper was peeling in at least three places. For all the dinginess, though, it was a room, and I needed one. By a feeble light I’d tried to work, but the sound of the storm outside kept distracting me. I decided to poke around the place and see if any previous guests had left anything unusual— a pack of playing cards, some cigarillos, and so on. Nothing like that came from my searches, but I did notice, tucked away under the bed, a mariner’s chest. I hauled it out— it was sparingly light, but it made a noise as if it were full of something crushingly heavy. No one knocked at my door to complain, though, so I looked it over, and then opened it. What can I tell you, I’m the curious sort.
It smelled of something faintly metallic and damp air, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It was, however, so dark I couldn’t see the bottom, and it wasn’t because of the weak candlelight. Attached to the inner lid was a crudely-written note:
“DON’T—! Leave it be. Not worth it.”
If the person who wrote such a thing truly wanted to keep me away from what was inside, they ought to have said “dreadfully boring” or “contains dead wasps”. Instead, they’d lit a fire under my curiosity, so I stuck my head in. Some terrible force seemed to tilt my chair, and I fell face-first into the chest, but— well, I didn’t, because I fell into my desk chair, in the same hotel room, the chest open on the floor where I’d left it. This was shocking, but not so much as the astonishing view of the moon and stars out of my window. They were large, like diamonds in the sky, and the moon so close I felt like I could jump towards it if I was outside. The town seemed different, too, the buildings of a fairytale height, though still the same mess of rough houses I’d last seen. I scrambled over to the chest, seeing a new note, in the same hand:
“Be satisfied, stop.”
Hardly that! I couldn’t wait to see the next… place? World? Alternative? Wherever it was, that was where I was bound. I dove into the chest, and appeared in my room, but the ceiling taller, as was my window, and the night much brighter out. I could see Mars, an umber coal in the sky, and the houses were like the crooked towers of a Medieval city. I also noticed the walls were closer than they’d been before, my once-ample room now rather small. Strange, but intriguing, and I examined the chest again.
“Do you see? Stop! Wait for morning, Hawk-Keppler in the library.”
Again, the writer of the note had failed to judge my character. Whoever this Hawk-Keppler was, I’d find out tomorrow *after* I tried to get to the bottom of this myself. I reasoned that either there was an end to the chest-worlds, or someone was trying to keep me out of the secret. I leapt in again.
“ONLY DESTRUCTION AWAITS—!”
I saw the ceiling stretch, and the edge of the universe halt. I looked into a void, and there was Nothing. I screamed as my skull pressed-up against the walls, and I looked into the firmament crammed into the atmosphere, incinerating and then exploding into a collapse as the universe finally stopped and compressed.
The cheap hotel room was draughty, the shadows ink in the recesses.
by submission | Oct 31, 2024 | Story |
Author: Rollin T. Gentry
Imagine a creature crafted from crushed bones and entropy. It may or may not have fangs, or claws, or even a face. It rides from calamity to calamity, crisis to crisis, along ley lines the scale of galaxies.
Wait. There he is, knocking at the door.
The door, an ancient relic of a forgotten civilization, shudders under the weight of the knock. It is not a sound but a vibration, a ripple through the fabric of reality itself. The air grows cold, and the shadows deepen as if the very light is retreating in fear.
Inside, Dr. Ellen Conner, an astrophysicist with a penchant for the arcane, feels the disturbance. Her instruments, designed to measure cosmic anomalies, go haywire. She had been expecting this visitor, though not with any sense of eagerness. The creature’s arrival was foretold in the cryptic texts she had spent years deciphering.
With a deep breath, she opens the door. The creature stands there, an amorphous silhouette against the backdrop of a starless void. Its presence is both overwhelming and intangible, like a nightmare given form.
“Dr. Conner,” it speaks, its voice a chorus of whispers, “you have summoned me.”
Ellen nods, her heart pounding. “I need your help. The fabric of our universe is unraveling, and only you can mend it.”
The creature tilts what might be its head. “And what makes you think I would help you, mortal?”
“Because,” Ellen replies, her voice steady despite the fear gnawing at her, “if our universe collapses, so does your playground. You thrive on chaos, but even chaos needs a stage.”
The creature seems to consider this, its form shifting and flickering. “Very well,” it finally says. “But know this: the price of my aid is steep.”
Ellen’s eyes harden with resolve. “Name it.”
The creature leans closer, its presence suffocating. “I am weary of my eternal existence, Dr. Conner. You will take my place, and I will live out your life. Only then will your universe be saved.”
Ellen’s mind races. The thought of becoming this entity, of losing her humanity, is terrifying. But the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. “If I agree, will you truly save us?”
The creature’s form flickers, almost as if it is smiling. “Once you see them as they truly are, you may save them if you wish.”
Before Ellen can respond, the swap happens. She feels as though she is being torn apart, her very essence unraveling. Rising upward, she sees her body below standing in the temple’s entrance. As she floats higher and higher, she sees the jungle, then South America, then the Ocean. Above the Earth, she stops and gazes down.
She sees the scars of humanity’s actions: the ravages of war, the devastation of the environment, the relentless march of global warming. She witnesses the suffering, the greed, the indifference. But there had been love, kindness, and joy, too?
She strains to see the good things as she hovers in the void, the weight of her choice pressing down on her. She is the creature now, and she sees through its eyes. There were good things, right?
by submission | Oct 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: Milo Brown
William Smith was very proud of his name, not because it was a very good name (although it was) but because it granted him a certain level of anonymity. In William’s opinion, the only better name would be John Doe, since the name John Smith was made famous, and in turn infamous, by Disney’s Pocahontas. William Smith was also very proud of his occupation; a common indulgence for white-collar Americans, but unusual in the sense that William had a true affinity for accounting, a passion few Accounting graduates could claim.
William enjoyed watching television, eating microwave dinners in front of the television, and walking his dog, Spot. His dog was in no sense spotted but rather very difficult to spot: Spot was a black lab who loved to dig in William’s backyard–a generous name for an untended dirt lot littered with holes and dried dog excrement–while the neighbors slept.
The sun would rise and the dog would rest and William would pour his instant coffee into a thermos of tap water; the sun would set and the dog would dig and William would go to bed. This is how life was for William, and this is how William liked life to be.
One morning, William noticed that Spot had dug in the same hole all night. Geez, he thought. What a weird dog. He poured his instant coffee into his tap water and drove his car to work.
The next day, the singular hole had grown slightly in circumference, and quite a bit more in depth. C’est la vie, thought William, who had picked up the phrase from the second Austin Powers movie and still wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I guess Spot really likes this hole.
By the third day, even William had to admit that he might have a problem. Perhaps the dog had found a colony of groundhogs–or, more likely, cockroaches. If this continues another day, thought William, I’ll call an exterminator.
Unfortunately for William, who would prefer to avoid a pack of exterminators (or anyone else) invading his solitude, the dog continued to dig, and so by the unspoken but otherwise quite binding pact that William had sworn with himself, the exterminator had to be called.
“We’re going to have to dredge up the whole,” the exterminator searched for an appropriate word for the shambling mess of dirt, before finally settling on “yard.”
“Hm,” grunted William. And so the exterminator and his crew began to dig.
A week passed without incident. The exterminators dug slowly to avoid the nonexistent sprinklers that watered the lawn William didn’t have. It seemed increasingly unlikely that the exterminators would find anything at all, be it sprinklers or cockroaches. But then, on a Tuesday afternoon, William received a call. He let it go to voicemail.
“You’d better come see this,” was all the exterminator said.
Now usually, William avoided such virtues as curiosity. Usually, he figured, things would work themselves out, and if they didn’t, he could forget about them. But something in the exterminator’s tone… Better to check.
As William pushed his way through his backdoor, the exterminator stared at something unseen beneath the house, his face awash with purple light. And then William saw it–a small dome peeking from beneath the house. Immediately, bizarrely, William knew what the object was, though it was neither flying, nor, in a sense, unidentified. There was an alien spaceship buried beneath his house. William stared in silence at the discovery that would break his solitude, his anonymity, and his privacy forever.
