by submission | Sep 17, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
A scientist, a priest, and a doctor walk into a bar. Sounds like the setup for a lame joke, huh? But no, it’s the beginning of a story about the end of the world. Or, I fear, not a story at all, but the actual end of the world. The truth is, I often cannot tell the difference between my stories and reality. A lot depends on whether I am taking my meds.
“Are you off your meds?” asks my brother, the psychiatrist.
“Yes, Pedro” I admit. “I can’t think right when I’m drugged. I can’t write right. And I have to keep my head on straight this morning to tell you something important.”
“I’m gonna make you boys breakfast,” says our mom. It wasn’t a bar. It was a restaurant. “Egg and pork burritos? Coffee for everyone but Alejandro? Orange juice for you, Alejo?”
We all nod yes.
“All right Al, what’s the story? What’s so important that we had to drop everything and meet you here?” says my brother, the priest. He likes to cut the crap and get right down to business. He’s already found the meaning to life, so he has little patience with those of us still struggling to figure it all out.
I want to build up to it slowly, to start with the first inklings I had and gradually add enough evidence to establish not only that it is The End, but that I am not crazy for saying so. Celio’s force of personality demolishes my plan, and I blurt out my fears.
“It’s the end of the world. This is not some plot I have dreamed up. At least I don’t think it is. Call it a premonition. All right, it was a dream. Many dreams over many nights. Each of you has told me, in your own words, what will happen, what is already happening. And I have told myself.”
Those looks. Worried about me. Concerned about my sanity.
I say to Juan, “Juanito, you told me it was something like, wait, I wrote it down.” Reading, “Something akin to quantum entanglement, something beyond particles, beyond large atomic ensembles, something on a massive scale, a planetary scale. You said the fate of our planet is forever bound to that of another.”
“I have told you not to call me Juanito. But I have never talked to you about quantum physics.”
“I know, Juanito. It was your twin, the other you in the other world, reaching out to me in my dreams.”
I expected them to stop me, to grab me, shake me out of…
“Go on,” the three said in unison.
Reading notes, “You, Celio, you said your planet was formed in the same firmament as ours and that it smote ours… uh, Juan, collided with ours and was… Celio, banished? Juan, ejected from the solar system, eventually to be captured by another star, a star that is going nova, whatever that is.”
“I, too, have had such dreams,” said Pedro. “I’ve been taking the meds I prescribed to you, but they haven’t helped.”
“I thought my dreams were premonitions of The Second Coming,” said Celio.
We all looked toward Juanito.
“All right, yes, I’ve had the dreams. My… twin… says they’ve detected changes in the star, gravity waves driving mass into… Their star is heating up, so their planet has been warming, slowly at first, but more rapidly of late. They predict eruptions before the supernova, explosions that will extinguish all life on their planet, which they call ‘Earth.'”
“Food will cheer you up, ninos,” said mom, bringing breakfast.
by submission | Sep 16, 2015 | Story |
Author : Davey Guardado
A city full of people and my favourite is that waitress.
“Will that be all for you sir?” She says, because she knows theres a reason why I’m paying with paper money.
I nod, handing her a crumpled five that she pulls away from my hand in disgust. She doesn’t bother to look back as she fills the coffee machine. Outside, reflected off the windows is blue neon.
I have another five, enough for cigarettes, she returns with my coffee and puts it on the table saying nothing.
I drink.
The skyscrapers stand tall around the city, their domotronics symmetrically playing advertisements on a feedback loop that circles their perimeter.
That waitress is a hard bitch.
I see her everyday, but we only speak when I have enough money to pay for a drink.
Up in the sky the gyrocopters glide across the abdomen of the buildings, the streets glow.
This city, these people, an intricate dance of protocol.
I turn to look at her, her features coming together to form a young woman. I can’t imagine how someone with all her imperfections could be considered as anything other than beautiful.
I leave, but something compels me to leave the other five as tip money.
I make my home in the alleyway in a cardboard box, shivering as I pull the newspaper around me.
I recognized that waitress by the colour of her eyes, the inherited traits passed down from mother to daughter. A billion faces in this city and hers was the only one that took, even a moment, to acknowledge my existence.
Up in the corporate arcologies, the valids excercized their programmed intelligences, their faces beautiful, but none more than the waitress on the 52nd.
The biometrics read a predisposition to narcotics, I was doomed from the day my parents realized they couldn’t afford to hand pick the traits that would have provided me a future.
Still, it shouldn’t have kept me from being a better father.
by submission | Sep 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Kate Runnels
Torque gazed down at the clouds scudding past below in a breeze she couldn’t feel. She sat at the edge of a rusting support beam. The beam, one of many that needed repairs, helped hold up the roof of her father’s Mechanic shop.
The constant thrum of the engines kept the city of New Perth in the sky, droned on in the background as she fiddled with her mechanical right arm. The tiny gears and joints sometimes clogged with dust and she liked to keep it clean; running smoothly. The small screwdriver tightened one last bolt and she slipped it into a side pocket as she flexed her right arm, watching the interplay of gears, pulleys and the fluid that represented blood pass through tubes.
Her chores finished, she stayed out of sight of her mother and the bastard of a new man she called husband, Malcolm. A drunk, pretending to run the shop: her father’s shop; her shop!
The same accident that had taken her arm had taken her father, and half the populace of New Perth.
The steel vibrated under her. Sark, Malcolm’s oldest son, two years older. He grinned at her. “Torque the dork. What are you doing? I’m sure father will love to know your shirking work.”
“If Malcolm’s not too sloshed.”
“What was that?” he demanded, stepping one foot out onto the beam. Scared, he kept hold of the hull wall, as there was only the starboard engine housing and the clouds.
She had been sitting, but a pitch in the background rumble caused her to stand, easily balanced on the 10 inch wide beam.
“What-”
She cocked her head slightly to one side to bring one ear upward. He opened his mouth then stopped, he’d heard it too. Another airship!
Torque glanced up in time to see a sleek fast moving airship streak out from above the bulk of the city and then it was past and diving down into the clouds.
It was followed by a ship that made the last look like a rusted old tug boat. As it fully emerged did the colors and the sigil penetrate into her astonished mind.
“A Royalty Air Cruiser.” She’d only seen the medical boat after the Blast.
It continued, following the other down into the clouds to vanish into the white.
What was it doing here? They chased pirates and brought order among all the floating cities.
The beam shook slightly and she glanced back to see him as Sark pulled back a meaty fist for a punch with a wicked gleam in his eyes.
She stepped back off the end of the beam. Torque dropped, her right arm catching the lip of the beam and she smiled as Sark, off balance, wind milled to keep himself from falling. Torque only used the beam to slow herself and change trajectory, swinging in toward the hull she released her grip.
Torque landed lightly on another beam that was part of the floor. She gripped a rusting hole in the hull, and metal on metal screeched in her grip. She didn’t stay long, but ran the length. Torque leaped off to fall into the gaping hole, a legacy of the Blast. Barely any light penetrated the shattered part of engineering. A moment of free fall then she landed, rolled to shed momentum and stopped with a bang as her right arm hit the inner wall.
She smiled at the memory of the look of his face as she leaped off. Let him try and follow her now.
by submission | Sep 14, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
The infinitesimal point that had been the universe bounded out and stars and galaxies returned to their proper places in the cosmos as I defolded back into normal space. I steered toward the small world orbiting the red giant star. From a distance, the planet appeared to have a ring system. I knew it didn’t. The “rings” were hundreds of thousands of vessels and beings and those for whom there was no distinction between the two.
The word had gone out long ago that we would meet here at this time. Some, like myself, had traversed the galaxy in the span between two adjacent moments. Many had had to cover the intervening space between here and wherever they came from at many times the speed of light, still painfully slow given the gulfs between the stars. Others had made the journey at subluminal speeds, a good many at so leisurely a pace that they had had to resort to multigenerational vessels or suspended animation ships, the civilizations that sent them now unrecognizable or extinct by virtue of the passage of centuries or millennia.
Several of the gathered races had never before had any contact. A few represented species currently at war with each other orbiting the planet together under various states of truce and ceasefire. There were oxygen-breathers and chlorine-breathers and those who didn’t breathe at all. There were biological races and machine races and races that incorporated elements of both. They had all come to this world for the same purpose: To say goodbye.
The quintillions of species that walked and crawled and swam and slithered and floated on millions of natural and artificial worlds throughout the Milky Way all traced their origin back to this small, dying planet. Its sun had been a yellow dwarf star billions of years ago. The aging star had become red and bloated and had already engulfed two worlds. Now it encroached on a third.
The mourners at this cosmic funeral paid their respects in diverse ways. A group of ten-legged crustaceans from some world near the galactic core played a mournful dirge. A collection of mammalian bipeds from a nearby system sang and got drunk. An aquatic species laughed riotously while a reptilian race wept and wailed. One robotic civilization bowed their heads in respectful silence while another society of mechanicals recited impromptu poetry.
Some of us tarried for days and others remained for months or even years as the planet’s surface blacked under the relentless heat. In time, I departed. As I slid into the interstices between dimensions, I thought that the galaxy, for all its endless diversity of life and civilization, seemed somehow lonely now for the loss of that tiny rock in the hinterlands that gave birth to us all.
by submission | Sep 13, 2015 | Story |
Author : S. Tyrel Murray
Darius looked out through his living room window, and noticed the diminutive, glittering metallic object in the grass. It wasn’t there fifteen minutes prior, when he had finished mowing his lawn. His inquisitive nature proved to be too much, and he bounded out the front door to inspect the object.
He could feel the air pulsating as he approached it, and saw shimmering lines around the object, almost as if they were heat rippling through the air. As he drew closer, the hair on the nape of his neck stood up, and a shiver ran down his spine. It wasn’t a feeling of fear, rather more like exhilaration.
The shimmering, pulsating air currents faded to nothing as he stood before the object. He bent down to grab it, and as his hand touched it, it began to melt. He tried to remove his hand, but he was locked into place, unable to move his body. The object began moving through the grass, much like maple syrup would, if it were poured out. As it touched his skin, it was absorbed into his hand.
It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t pleasant, either. He could feel the metallic fluid push through the skin on his hand. As quickly as it had begun, it was over. Darius collapsed onto the grass, unconscious.
He awoke a few minutes later to the sound of a woman calling out his name. The voice was unfamiliar to him, and he was startled to find no other person around, save for himself. He pulled himself up from the ground, and hurriedly entered his front door.
“This is crazy,” he exclaimed. “That didn’t just happen!”
“Oh, you silly child. It most certainly did happen.” The woman’s voice was still there. He felt a sense of dread come over him, and a sickly pall crept across his face.
“Who are you?” he demanded, not knowing whether he was talking to a ghost, or a figment of his imagination. He stumbled his way through the house, finding his way into the bathroom. Looking into the mirror, he noted that apart from surprise or shock, his appearance had not changed since the morning. Then it happened. She appeared in the mirror, standing to his right.
“Is this better?” she queried. Gathering his courage, he peered to the right of himself, and saw nothing there. His gaze returned to the visage of a lovely, early 20s brunette in the mirror.
“Please don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm.” He was awash in various emotions, but he collected himself, and nodded. “I’m sorry I had to integrate with you without your consent, but I had no choice.”
“What are you? Are you an alien?” He asked, not knowing whether he wanted the answer, or not.
“Heaven’s no! I’m a Neuronal Induction Nanotech Agent. Nina, for short.”
His worry subsided, and he began to smile. “Hi Nina. I’m Darius. Its a pleasure to meet you.”
