by submission | Jun 20, 2017 | Story |
Author : Charles Paul Wallace
Ashura contorted her body, thrust her arm through the jagged rip in the ship’s inner hull and aimed the flash-driver at the stuck bolt.
Which, as ever, refused to turn.
She slumped back down to the shrapnel-strewn floor and considered her possibilities.
One: give up; wait for the remaining air to seep into space; die.
Two: Leave the escape pod compartment without, somehow, suffocating in the vacuum of the rest of the ship, and locate any surviving tools that might help solve her predicament.
Three: keep trying.
One was not an option. The Pan-African Space Agency was on shaky enough footing already without adding cowardice to the catalogue of errors. If corners hadn’t been cut on the ship’s construction, if Commander Musonda hadn’t panicked when the alarm flashed into life…She was determined the last remaining survivor of the mission would show no weakness.
Option two seemed an impossibility. The asteroid-net had scythed through the outer hull, obliterating the rest of the crew in one fell swoop. Musonda’s death had followed swiftly once he made the mistake of severing the command capsule from the power module. The resultant blast of nuclear material had billowed through the vessel’s interior in seconds. Ashura had heard it all from where she had taken shelter by the escape pods. She had only survived the blowback by pure luck. Now, her one chance of survival lay with…
Option three: keep on trying and hope for the best.
Small hope though it was.
She stretched her arm through the tear in the bulkhead once more. Centimetres away, the bolt sat beside the pod’s release mechanism, unconcerned and indifferent to her attempts to turn it. She switched on the screwdriver for the briefest second. How absurd, that her survival should rest on the waning charge of this tool. How narrow the divide between success and failure. She grimaced; the same could be said for the entire mission.
The bolt, naturally, didn’t move.
She withdrew her arm and tried to think. The dwindling oxygen supply was making such an exercise near-impossible; she tried pinching herself, slapping herself, anything to clear her thoughts. The fuzz inside her head ballooned, a clouding, impenetrable miasma…
A memory came to her: her mother, on her hands and knees in their barn. The farm where Ashura had spent her childhood seemed to manifest itself around her, out here in the void. Her mother, arm extended inside the only cow they could afford, was desperately trying to pull its calf out before the beast expired from the effort. Sweat drenched her forehead. Ashura could do nothing other than shout words of encouragement.
“Mother!” she screamed. “Pull! Pull!”
Her mother gave one last almighty wrench. With a sound of slurping mud the calf tumbled out onto the straw. The cow gave out a low that shook the air, turned its giant head and began to lick its child clean.
Suddenly Ashura was back on the ship. A sharp pain in her arm, and the stench of the farm became the stench of stale air. She found she had thrust her hand back through the hole without even realising it. The driver glowed. With a final, infinite effort she waved it above the bolt and jammed it forward.
It slipped from her grasp and tumbled to the floor with a clank.
Weeping, she lay her head on the cold metal of the hull.
And it was seconds before she heard the hiss of the turning bolt; and then the womb-like interior of the escape pod lay before her, ripe with the promise of rebirth in the stars.
by submission | Jun 18, 2017 | Story |
Author : Liam Hogan
“What do you remember?”
It was what they asked. Teacher, Scientist, Mother. The same testing question, always.
Heads bowed, we stared at our desks. We didn’t understand why, but we knew the question was dangerous.
“I… I remember…” a voice crept out from my left and I screwed my eyes shut.
“Yes, Tommy?” the Teacher coaxed.
The classroom held its breath.
“I remember… there were more of us.”
There was a long silence. “No, Tommy. You are mistaken. That is enough school for today. Your Mothers are waiting.”
We filed out into the corridor, ashamed, silent, eyes fixed on the heels of the boy in front.
There were only eleven Mothers.
Tommy’s wasn’t there.
He was right though; Tommy. There had been more. The empty desks hadn’t always been empty, even if I couldn’t remember the older boys who had sat there.
There would be another empty desk, tomorrow. I promised myself I would remember his name.
And his lesson.
Tommy had remembered something you weren’t supposed to notice. And that had been enough.
Back home, Mother sat me down, lowered herself to my level.
“What do you remember, Alex?” she asked.
Worms writhed in my stomach. In the classroom, you could hide behind the other boys, wait for one of them to fill the void with a safe, recent, memory.
“What do you remember?” Mother insisted.
But when you were asked direct, there was no escape. You had to find an answer. One that kept Mother happy.
Only, I remembered so much more than I should. I remembered before.
I remembered a sister; a smiling, sleeping, crying baby sister.
I remembered a moon, as well as a sun.
I remembered trees, and grass, and birds.
And I remembered my mother. My real mother.
Delicate purple fronds emerged from the tip of Mother’s arm, wiping away the tears as I sobbed. Fleshy pads tilted my chin until I met her glittering eyes. And a hushed voice whispered in my ear:
“What do you remember?”
by submission | Jun 17, 2017 | Story |
Author : Philip Gustavus Hostetler
It wasn’t enough that we could destroy the world with ICBMs. Underground bunkers utilizing solar, wind and tidal power. Seed banks, stem cell grown proteins, aquaponics. It all makes life very liveable in the human, civilized sense.
Still amidst all of this, we still watch the skies.
I think, perhaps, that life is not truly what we desire. No, not in any diverse sense of the word anyway. One of our astronomers noted that comet was headed our way, not any ordinary comet; a virtual maelstrom of ice, terratons of glacial debris from an outlying Bastard Planet (That’s what we call Pluto now…) from another solar system in the milky way.
An astrophysicist was relieved to say that it would miss us and pass closely to the sun. General Flynt asked,
“How close?” he said,
“Too close for comfort, that’s what the astronomer told me, we’ll barely survive, the Ice Maelstrom passing so close will reduce the temperature and radiation of the sun, our solar power will not sustain us, we will depend on wind and tide for maybe 6 years before we need heat.”
The General went to the Applied Atomic Scientist and ordered, “You said you can knock us out of orbit using an ion pulse. Do it at this exact time.” What we didn’t expect is for the General to push the orbit of the solar system by method of Precession. He pushed the sun right into the path of the Maelstrom.
We’ve won. We’ve shown the Pastinians once and for all that the Futurists are right.
by submission | Jun 16, 2017 | Story |
Author : Matthieu C. R. Cartron
It was after several hours, and, several brief outbursts, that Henry came to a most significant conclusion: A frog simply cannot learn calculus.
Henry was a very smart nine-year-old. So smart, in fact, that he was already taking college courses. Henry was a well-rounded student, but of all his unusual abilities, his most remarkable aptitude was in the subject of mathematics. Numbers, as he had once told his mother, just simply made sense to him.
But math, as Henry soon found out, was not a favorite subject of most creatures. Including frogs.
There was a small creek near Henry’s house where they would congregate and cavort at the edge of the water, and, with some difficulty, Henry had managed to capture one with a plastic container.
Henry loved learning, and was always eager to impart his own knowledge onto others. His peers at the elementary school were bored by his interests and annoyed by his attempts to enlighten them. But, would frogs, which people might label as incognizant and stupid, be more willing to learn? Henry had decided to give it a shot.
He had dragged an easel out into the backyard and had placed the container with the frog only a few feet in front of it. With a pen and a stick broken off from a nearby tree, Henry had begun his introduction and instruction of derivatives—using the paper on the easel as a makeshift drawing board. But the frog, lethargic from his failed attempts to jump from the sealed plastic prison, looked the other way. Henry would notice and would reprimand the inattentive frog for his behavior, but it was to no avail. Even manually turning the container did little to spark the interest of the indifferent amphibian.
But Henry had an idea. Perhaps this particular frog would be inspired to learn if there were motivated peers around him. Henry needed role models, and to find them, he headed back to the creek where after an hour, he had managed to collect five more frogs.
When Henry’s mother saw the six containers and the easel in the backyard, she marched out the back door to the enigmatic scene.
“Henry, what is the meaning of all of this?” she exclaimed.
After Henry relayed his thought process to her, she explained to her son that frogs, and just about every other creature, do not have the mental capacity to understand most of what humans can. It made sense to Henry, and it was what his conscience had surreptitiously concluded after the disappointing results of the first frog.
But what Henry said next to his mother caught her off guard.
“If it is impossible for frogs to understand what we can, then is it possible that we might not understand some things that others can?”
“Well, I . . . I suppose Henry.”
Henry’s mother was unsure if this was in fact true, but Henry was right. From the fifth dimension, two undefinable beings, known as Aeruleels, had perceived Henry’s entire day, and were especially amused by what his mother had said.
“What was it she said? Oh yes, ‘what is the meaning of all of this?’”
The two Aeruleels crowed with laughter.
“It comes up again and again, the most important question to the human race,” one of the Aeruleels said.
“Well,” the other Aeruleel said. “We have tried many times to give them the answer, but as we have learned. . .”
The two Aeruleels smiled and then spoke simultaneously.
“Humans simply do not have the mental capacity to understand.”
by submission | Jun 15, 2017 | Story |
Author : John Gerard Fagan
The air inside smelled of bonfires. He shivered and fastened the boy’s jacket to the top.
“Try and sleep,” Claud said. Broo replied with silence, staring at boots that were too big for his feet. They huddled together on the ship’s metallic floor for warmth, lost in fearful thoughts, listening to the hum of the vents. There wasn’t enough air for both of them to make the journey, never mind water or food. He had stayed too long. Time was up.
“Pa?”
“Yes?”
“Promise you won’t leave me.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“If you run, I’m running. You said that.”
“Yes.” Claud sniffed and placed an arm over his shoulders. “But I want you to make it, Broo. If I stay here we both die. You know that.”
“But I don’t know what to do,” the boy said, eyes watering.
“All you have to do is be brave. This pod is headed for one of our colonies. There’s some good people there. You just have to find them.”
“How?”
Claud kissed the boy’s head. “Don’t worry about it right now. You’ll know when you get there. Just stay strong.”
He heated a red soup and they ate in silence. They were a long way from home, but it still called to him like a long forgotten song from childhood. All that was left was fading memories. Her face was still clear though. Always would be. Even after the trees, rivers and fields of summer were long gone.
He looked at the boy with eyes welling. Almost five. Worth dying for. Worth all the sacrifice. Worth leaving her behind.
“I want to see it one last time,” Broo whispered. Claud nodded and lifted him to the small window. They stared but could only see the darkness of space. No stars. Moon. Nothing.
“Pa?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want to go without you.”
“I know.”
“Promise you’ll stay with me then.”
Claud placed his jacket over the boy’s shoulders and wiped the hair away from his forehead.
“If I promise will you sleep?”
“Okay.”
“Then I promise.”
“With your whole heart?”
“With my whole heart.”
Claud waited until Broo was asleep. Hands shaking. Eyes wet and running. Any longer they were both dead. He stepped into the release port and sealed the door behind. He closed both eyes, pulled the leaver and drifted from the ship.
