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.
by submission | Mar 31, 2018 | Story |
Author: Neil Otte
Sean sighed as he leaned his head back against the tree. The good ones always left him with this amalgamation of thoughts and feelings, this clash of excitement and longing with the realization of routine and boredom.
He closed his eyes and listened to the water in the stream and rustle of the leaves. He felt the warmth on his bare feet where they encountered the light at the edge of the shade. This is why he came to the park to read. The solitary quiet made the transition back to reality somewhat more bearable.
It had been this way ever since he first realized the marks on the page conveyed meaning, created worlds that couldn’t be seen with his eyes. Thomas, Winnie and Piglet, Max; they took him with them. Taught him loyalty, goodness, and perseverance. Let him step into their worlds and wonder if he could ever be so daring, or humble, or wise. Then, as he grew, he rafted down the Mississippi with Tom and Huck, ate hotroot soup at Redwall Abbey, climbed Mount Doom with Frodo and Sam, and fought chaos with Pendragon and Lord Foul with Foamfollower and Bannor. Then he had discovered that heroes were not always make believe. He circumnavigated the earth, climbed Mount Everest and explored the South Pole with real people.
But he was born too late for that type of real-life adventure. Everything was charted and analyzed. Plus, he was stuck here in this remote corner of the universe where life dribbled by in a monotonous, mind-numbing rhythm. Digging minerals out of the ground day after day. Mom and Dad said they were a “tight knit community”. He longed for a new face, a new horizon. He had never seen an ocean or mountain with his own eyes. He had never been more than 110 km from this little nowhere where he was born. He wanted to go, he wanted to do and be! Adventure, excitement, heroic deeds were what he was made for. If only he could have been born 500, 200, or even 50 years ago. Then he would have lived a life worth living. Then he would not have to live with this constant ache and yearning.
He felt it first as a deep, bone resonating vibration that was far below the frequency his ears could discern. The vibration increased until the leaves were dancing on the limbs above him and he could hear the deep rumble as it climbed up the octaves. He glanced up just in time to see the stars beyond the park’s observation strips occluded by a blunt, massive object as it hurtled past. He glanced at his comp pad. Exactly what he had been thinking. Five ten on the dot and another 210 metric tons on its way in-system to the Goslar refinery station. The same thing three times a day, every day. His eyes strayed toward the brightest star, the Sun. Somewhere in that general direction was Earth, where it started, birthplace of the human race. Oh, to be free to walk under open sky, to have a whole world to discover.
The 5:10 meant that he only had half an hour to get home and cleaned up. He tucked his comp pad into his satchel as he loped over to the slidewalk. He was supposed to meet Chip and Zee and take the tube to Crystal Creek Cavern where they had just opened a soaring park over the thermal vents. He could do some browsing on the tube. He needed a new book.
by submission | Mar 30, 2018 | Story |
Author: Jatayu
It made headlines. It was the talk of social media for a week which is, like, forever.
“Someone came back!”
“Wait, what? When? Who?”
No one knew who and that was cause for amazement too; since World Citizenship came online there simply weren’t any unknowns left. It was crazy!
Okay, that’s enough exclamations. You get the picture. As the days went by the newsies sent out little tidbits of information about the man; he was a man, first of all, a survivor of the New York firestorm- that was last year, thus ancient history except to those of us who lost loved ones. My husband died there. They never identified his body, incinerated along with almost a million others. I missed him terribly…
This man, this survivor, was one of the lucky few to be sent to HEAVEN. No one had ever returned from there.
The consensus of opinion (in a world of anonymous news and photoshop facts are hard to come by) is that the Hospital of Emendation and Aceology Via Enthetic Neogenesis, located somewhere near Oslo was a Virtual Eden which only accepted members of the platinum class and above who had suffered catastrophic destruction, uploading their personalities into a perfect virtual world while trying to salvage whatever was left.
Less than 1% of these patients were saved and none of them had chosen to return to the flesh.
Of course the other 98% of humanity, like me and my poor Bill, could never afford such things. Since Automation, most of us could barely survive. We live our lives and die our deaths and try to find happiness in between. But sometimes we get lucky…
Today someone knocked on my door. Today I found out who had come back.
He was surrounded by bright lights, cameras, and reporters but I only had eyes for my dear, my beloved Bill. I fell into his arms crying. I asked him, holding tight,
“What happened?”
He answered in his quiet way,
“They picked up the wrong guy. When they realized the mistake, they said I could stay, said they had a ‘moral obligation ‘ but I couldn’t stay.”
I thought of the long odds that had brought my heart back to me. I thought of miracles and sobbed,
“You were in Heaven my darling. Why did you leave?”
He looked at me with a love deep as oceans and smiled.
“Because you weren’t there.”
by submission | Mar 29, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mina
Dr Carlson looked up wearily as the last patient of the day came in. She was a new patient, Emily Mitte-Kunagi. He noticed that her body language and her clothes were aimed at not drawing attention to herself. It worked until she sat down, removed her darkly tinted wrap-around glasses and looked him in the eyes. Her eyes were a deep indigo, with flecks of silver. That simply wasn’t possible; he had read that they were now extinct. Yet here she sat, living proof that at least one Vaata remained.
She cocked her head at him, intrigued:
– I sense no fear in you. That is unusual.
– Are you always met with fear?
– Yes, with fear, terror even, hatred, anger, revulsion… not usually with simple curiosity.
– Well, psychologists are ultimately just curious observers.
She closed her eyes for a moment:
– Oh! You are ill and… dying. I thought the Kalevi Empire had eradicated all disease?
– Well, all apart from the Super Bugs we created by living in such sterile environments. Even then, we can usually be vaccinated against them. I was the one in a million for whom the vaccine did not work. Haigus B is untreatable. I may be almost symptom-free for a year or two, but then it will begin to affect all major organs. Death will be slow and not kind… But what brings you here today?
– Loneliness. It is also a slow and unkind death.
For the next hour, she talked of what it felt like to be the last one left, to always be running and hiding, to have no one and nothing to rely on. She had searched through several galaxies but had found no other survivors of the Tapma Cleansings, as they were now called. In times of war, Vaata oracles had been greatly valued. They had allied themselves with humanity during the Vooras Invasion. But in times of peace, humans had turned against the Vaata, afraid of their “sight”. Emily explained that the popular misconception that the Vaata could read all your thoughts had led to their annihilation.
– You cannot read thoughts?
– No, it is more like sense impressions of your future. As some are of only a few minutes ahead, it can feel as if we are mind readers.
She paused.
– I had planned to kill you at the end of our appointment and then myself. I did not want to die as I have been living for the past few decades: helpless, hunted and completely alone.
Dr. Carlson, feeling oddly calm and detached, remained silent. Emily continued:
– I am considering an alternative. I could take you to the edges of the known universe and show you wonders you cannot imagine. In exchange for your companionship, I can promise you a kinder death when the time comes. And I can promise you that I will be with you on that final journey.
Dr. Carlson laughed, feeling almost euphoric:
– Why not? But if we are to be traveling companions for a while, we need to introduce ourselves properly.
Holding out his hand, he said as he shook her hand:
– Hello Emily. My name is Ivan.
– Hello Ivan. My name is actually Saar Valge.
– Perhaps we could record all your memories on our travels, Saar, so that something remains of the Vaata?
– Perhaps.
Ivan stood and offered Saar his arm. As they left the room, his voice commands erased all recordings of the last hour and turned off the lights.
