by submission | Aug 26, 2015 | Story |
Author : Ken McGrath
My mother often said that before I learned to walk I ran.
I ran everywhere; probably why I wasn’t so quick at learning to read. I couldn’t sit still for very long, didn’t like having my feet parked beneath a desk you see. I’d an abundance of energy, that’s why I was always darting around the place, chasing everything from footballs to girls. Heck I even chased the odd dream.
And I caught a few too, like the one thing that got me through school. Relay races, the sprint, hurdles. I did it all, although I wasn’t so good at that last one. Seems I never was great at overcoming obstacles. The one minute mile however, that was what stole my heart. A stretch of open track, pure focus and immediate results. Sheer beauty.
When I went from my teens into my twenties I kept upping the distance, ticking off boxes. 10k, 20k. Even the big one a few times.
Then when I was 29 I ran into Bernadette Walters. Beautiful, slender, ambitious Bernadette Walters who had lips that would set you weak at the knees and a shard of ice for a heart. But I found that out much too late, because after we married I ran into a wall. Work, bills, the mortgage on a tiny apartment that went too quickly from bijou to coffin-box. It was too much. I ran myself into the ground.
The pounds began to slide on and, for the first time, life ran away from me. Yet somehow in the midst of it all we conceived and along came my little Suzie, my precious girl. And for a while she brightened everything up, but it didn’t last. We quickly fell back on old habits, staying together just for our little girl.
When Suzie was three I started to run again. Tentative steps in the park at night. Some men might have cheated on their wives but I did the only thing I knew how, I put one foot in front of the other and built up laps. Every night, always coming back to the same place no matter how fast or how far I ran, life had become a circuit of cold stares and bitter, poisonous words.
We were out on Christmas Eve pretending to be a real family when the first attack came. The blast dropped from the heavens like God screaming and tore the shopping centre we were walking towards into pieces. I grabbed Suzie, turned and ran. There were screams but I didn’t look back. I just kept going. I had to make sure my girl was safe.
Weeks have passed now. The snow is melting and buds are appearing on some of the trees. From talking to other survivors I’ve learned of the hundreds of simultaneous attacks around the world. They say those first blasts were an extermination front-wave, firing pulse after pulse and reducing our cities to rubble, disrupting humanity for the coming alien invasion.
They say there’s a Resistance coming together but I don’t want to be part of it. All I do is run. I have my girl and I teach her to run too.
So long as I have legs beneath me I’ll continue to do run. It’s all I’ve known since I was born. If my daughter is to survive she’s going to have to learn to run too and maybe then I’ll have done something good with my life.
by submission | Aug 25, 2015 | Story |
Author : Kraigher Lutz
They had first found it, there at the highway split. They had seen its design in the leaves and grass. The design spiraled out, burning the soil.
We had worked quick trying to contain it; cranes high overhead, holding harshly shining spotlights. Trenches were dug and cinder-block walls were built; clear plastic sheeting covered it, but the loose pieces of the vapor-lock blew in the breeze, spiraling upon itself and unfurling in the design.
They had tried to dig it all out, but it was still there; dry dirt crumbling out of the tines of the backhoe, falling, curling and twisting the design in the breeze.
At the lab, they tried to contain it. Locked away in Petri dishes, its design crawled through the agar.
It was then that we first started hearing it. A soft and melodious symphony of pulses and beats, flowing into each other and bouncing off of another; like a tribal rendition of Morse Code.
It was quiet at first, like an afterthought of white noise. Then it started to incorporate into everyday noises, the pop of the toaster, car horns, children’s songs at recess. It became all-encompassing and fully integrated into everyday life.
After forty-two years, there wasn’t hardly anyone alive who could remember a time before it; without it. Those who were older simply could not remember. Large chunks of memories spontaneously vanished.
But we are pattern seeking animals. Slowly but surely, the pieces were coming back together.
by submission | Aug 23, 2015 | Story |
Author : Soo Kim
I had been taken.
Her hands clutched the bar across her lap, as the seat swung to some soundless melody. It hovered expectantly, like the next carriage of the ghost train at a macabre amusement park, waiting to lurch forward, through the chill, silent night.
Wrists aching from the bandages, ragged now where they hid the razor’s kiss. She turned to look at him, white beside her. Only his long hair moved, like sinewy gossamer waving slowly. She dared not breathe.
The chasm opened in front of them; a gaping toothless maw. At last with a jerk the seat propelled forward, and they entered the dark, ducking and weaving through the naked girders of the cavern’s supporting structure. The deepening black, spread beneath, like an oil slick, thick and sticky on their eyelids.
There was presence here. She could see the red blinks of tiring LEDs, that caught reflections off metallic bodies strewn like straw, limp over twisted mounds of junk. The fug of abandon twitched at her nostrils. It took hold of her, the still broken lives of the machines.
She knew that they were waiting, watching ready to rise up and take her; to strip her and change her into what they were. Empty broken things. She clutched the talktalk to her chest, afraid it would betray her, its pulsing light and vibration would be enough to wake those frozen limbs into clutching hands and desperate, wailing voices. The seat carrying them forward slowed. A raised service platform of punched steel plate appeared, dimly lit above the mechanical graveyard they were travelling through. She thought that it looked like a stage awaiting some kind of monstrous freakish act.
They stood, together on the platform, an island, surrounded by an ocean of malware. A still obidient audience, waiting the final performance. He turned. Behind her there was a flicker of movement in the dark; a strange grinding squeak as if from a rusted clockwork mouse. He pushed roughly. She fell towards the sound, tumbling to the feet of figure tainted with the glimmer of metal emerging from the dark.
Tall, breasts firm and high, her once golden skin tarnished with age and streaked with oil and grime. But she was still whole and strong. Her face hidden, hunched. The slow mechanical squeak was coming from her turning hand like a sour organ grinder. She straightened, the wrenching caught and her face exposed. The frayed jumble of optic fibres finished in empty sockets and her nose a collapsed bridge falling into a deep ragged hole from the middle of her head down to where her mouth had been. Her hand still clutched the arm of the mangle where what had been the remnants of her hair was caught between the massive rollers, her head mottled with broken stubble twisted chunks bleeding black from the roots, down the eyeless sockets, dribbling down her neck.
And she knew it was HER and that HE had brought her here and SHE was to be her tool. She heard a voice, still strong and deep and she felt the desire and the will of HER voice – what would it take to make me beautiful again…
by submission | Aug 22, 2015 | Story |
Author : David J.Wing
Glen sat there, silently and watched as his star ship slipped backwards and at a slightly funny angle into the Black Hole. It was fair to say that being stranded, as he so clearly now was, would be a hindrance to his plans for a luxurious holiday, but given that he had managed to avoid being torn molecule from molecule, it had to be viewed as some sort of success.
The light from the neighbouring satellite planets shone defiantly in the face of the hole and while they were destined to slide one by one from existence, it was comforting to Glen that he wasn’t the only one left alive.
The ratty little creatures that scurried back and forth squeaked and cursed as they searched for safety, surely sensing their imminent end. The high pitched squeals that shot through the wind seemed to foreshadow the fall of the sky and the rising of the seas.
Glen scratched his thigh, the back of his head and finally his left bum cheek, then stood up and tried his communicator once more. The static was a welcome relief from the silence that had come before. He tuned along the mid-range, pressed the record function and called.
“Mayday, Mayday, this is Glen Charles IV. Sole survivor of the tour ship, Regal, addressing any ship within range. My vessel was caught in an anomaly and I am stranded on the Green planet. Mayday.”
Glen set the message to repeat and lay back on the sand. No point in not enjoying this enforced shore leave. The tour ship had been a disappointment from beginning to end. The catering was sub-par, the accommodation severely acute and the company, save for a rather lovely Anterran, entirely too foreign and while there seemed to be no opportunity for canoodling here either, Glen thanked these not-so-lucky stars that there were no Honushions with him. Their aroma, reduced to a manageable tolerance on board thanks to the scrubbers, would surely saturate and impregnate this little planet in minutes.
It was doubtful even the rattys would survive them.
The message tittered along and Glen opened one of the three bottles of Champagne he’d salvaged from the Galley before abandoning the ship. It was a little warm but the pop was gratifying and scattered a few insects that had sought to avail themselves of his booty. The hours passed and the lights in the sky continued to blink, three, then two, then one and gone. The sea rose in the distance and save for the debris washing up to his left and right, carried with it a calm devastation.
The communicator squawked into life.
“This is the merchant ship, Jalin, we received your distress signal and stand ready to assist you. How many survivors?”
Glen frowned a little and then hit the reply button.
“Jalin? From the Honushion nebula?”
“That’s right.”
Glen screwed up his nose and watched the tidal wave rush ever closer.
“It’s OK, think I’ll wait for the next one”.
by submission | Aug 19, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
It’s been a subjective month since we changed history. It feels like ten years. In reality, an infinitesimal fraction of a second has passed for us in the Stopwatch. That’s the unofficial and pathetically unoriginal name some smart aleck gave to the Temporal Exclusion Facility shortly before we started our experiment.
“Another report,” says a tired-looking undergrad to me as another anomaly dispatch pops up on the holodisplay.
Martin Luther tweets Ninety-Five Theses
Getting closer, I silently say to myself. I think back to how it all began. We were warned by both our fellow students and the faculty not to try this experiment. It would never work, they admonished us, but it might damage university equipment. They were wrong.
It had started as a late night, alcohol-fueled brainstorming session: What if the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had admitted Adolph Hitler? He had no artistic talent, of course. He had been rightly rejected by the Academy. But what if someone had persuaded the powers that be to admit him anyway? Perhaps through the inducement of a large donation to the Academy? Or maybe just a large donation to the ones who determine who got admitted? Could the nightmare of World War II and the cold and hot wars that resonated on from it be avoided? There was a way to find out.
“Report!” says the undergrad.
American and Confederate Presidents meet at the Mason-Dixon Wall
“So we’re back to just the USA and the CSA? The Pacific States of America is gone?” I ask. “What about Canada?”
“Canada is back,” says the undergrad. “It’s no longer part of the USA and its borders are more or less like they’re were originally.”
More progress. Maybe we’ll pull this off yet. I think back to the first night. World War II had been averted. Millions of lives had been saved. But then we’d discovered it had only been delayed, not eliminated. A Second World War had begun in 1951. And this one quickly escalated into a nuclear conflict. We went back and tried to undo our original intervention. The original World War II was restored, but this time the Third Reich didn’t try to invade Russia. Able to concentrate all its military effort on the western front, Nazi Germany survived the war intact.
July 20, 1969: Buzz Aldrin becomes first man to walk on the Moon
“Okay,” I say. “So Aldrin stepped out before Armstrong. That’s fine. Don’t try to correct that.”
“We’ve got a problem,” says another student from across the control room. “The Soviet Union didn’t fall in the late 20th Century. Looks like the USA and USSR have a limited nuclear exchange in 2003. But it doesn’t escalate into a full-scale global war.”
“We can’t let that stand,” I say. “We need an intervention that will weaken the Soviets so the USSR collapses in 1991 like it’s supposed to.”
For thirty days and nights we’ve been endlessly intervening in history, a nudge here, a great shove there, trying to restore the timeline.
SOVIET UNION DISSOLVES INTO COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES
“Have we succeeded?” I ask.
“Checking,” says one of my fellow students.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said you can never step twice into the same river. A complete restoration will never be possible. But maybe this time we’re close enough. Maybe this time…
A chorus of moans erupts among the others.
“What?!” I yell.
A new report pops up on my holodisplay:
COMMUNIST COLLAPSE ENDS COLD WAR BETWEEN SOVIETS AND IROQUOIS EMPIRE
I punch the display. The ephemeral words scintillate around my fist.
